The Retrospective

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The Retrospective: EPIC failure by our hosting company leaves us in the dark

March 2nd, 2009 by

mtfail

In the world we live in your brand, company, and product are under such scrutiny in so many ways that most companies can’t even begin to fathom the repercussions of their actions.

Over the weekend Media Temple, the company who hosts our website went down unexpectedly (or so I was lead to believe). Now when this occurred, I wasn’t notified for almost 4 hours! Eventually, some generic email was sent out barely eluding to the shear scale of the issue. A quick call to tech support (they are so lucky humans run this or it would of been even MORE disastrous) told me we would be up in about 30 minutes.

30 plus hours later–our blog was STILL down! We were losing traffic and money like it was going out of style (We’re in a recession people, websites can’t be going down like this). Almost as instant as our blog went down every facet of social media began banding together to exude the frustration they had bottled up. People as far as Australia were contacting me on Twitter to tell me of their woes. Companies can no longer hide the way they used to when things go sour. Back in the day you could quietly make mistakes (this is a huge FAIL) and no one would be the wiser. Look at Pepsi, they just reverted back to their old Tropicana design after hundreds of blogs, tweets, and comments unanimously exiled the new design.

Like our new president, companies need to be transparent and allow almost full disclosure when they make mistakes or are in the wrong. At the end of the day you have to remember everything is amazing and nobody’s happy, especially not us. We will be back upto speed in the coming hours. Thank you for your patience.

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Charles West Mar 2, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    Boy, I was beginning to worry… but it’s nice to see everything back up and running.

  • 2 Ethan Hackett Mar 2, 2009 at 11:48 pm

    I have a client on MT hmmm….

    This continues to raise the question:
    Does branding shape people or do people shape branding?

  • 3 Gitamba Saila-Ngita Mar 3, 2009 at 12:18 am

    I think anyone who is in branding would say that the brand shapes people. But brands can become zealots and forget the power of their consumers voice.