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Media Temple Outage Issues This Morning – Awesome Communications
Earlier today Media Temple suffered some downtime and an outage due to a DNS issue with their DNS servers. The issue began around 7am Pacific – I noticed the issue shortly thereafter because I host the CloudContacts blog on Media Temple. From what I can tell, it looks like the sites are starting to return.
My feelings about downtime remain the same – every web service will have some amount of downtime, the key is how the company communicates with customers during and after the downtime that makes the difference. At least for today, I give Media Temple the “awesome” tag when it comes to how they have been communicating with all of us.
First, they posted on the status blog a number of real-time notes regarding the outage. It seems that their phone lines are all tied up (which is understandable) so they suggest using the status blog to monitor updates.
Next, they are using Twitter to communicate with customers who tweet about the issue. In monitoring their Twitter account, it looks like they are answering nearly every tweet that mentions the Media Temple outage.
Lastly, they have created a video to clearly explain what the issue is. This simply is awesome – it shows the human side and makes customers like myself know that they are working on the issue. It appears they create a video for all of their issues. Today’s video is embedded below. Late last year Skype had an outage and shortly after the issue was resolved, CEO Tony Bates created a video to offer an apology and explain what happened. I am willing to bet we will see more video used in the future when companies want to explain customer service issues.
Hey Allen,
Thanks for the fair review sir.
Cheers,
Jason
First of all, we’d like to thank you, Allen, for this great review. We always try to provide customers with as much knowledge as possible during incidents. With that being said, we understand the severity of the situation yesterday, the frustration of our customers, and the unneeded strain it puts on all parties involved.
We strive to provide an amazing service to our customers, and we know that at times we fall short. With the string of recent issues on the (gs) Grid-Service, our team has been diligently working on and implementing improvements to provide customers with a better experience. For the most part, the recent maintenance on the (gs) had provided a good amount of positive feedback from many customers. However, today’s events had nothing to do with any one particular service, but instead with DNS. Further explanation of what occurred is presented here:
http://status.mediatemple.net/incidents/1973-web-and-email-service-interruption/
Aside from that, we would just like to clear up some information about how we communicate with our customers. Whenever issues like this occur, we try to provide concise and timely information to all customers. We do our best to provide updates & information as accurately as possible. We find it to be counterproductive to hurriedly post information before getting all the facts, as it makes an already stressful situation more complicated. Once the first update goes out to customers, we do our best to keep the updates coming every hour.
To touch on social media, Twitter is usually used as our support line during (U.S.) business hours. When there is an incident, Twitter usually turns into a live stream of “up to the minute” information on what’s happening and who is being affected. We try to keep our updates in sync with our status blog, unless any pertinent information breaks that we are able to get out immediately. Also, we understand that many of our customers enjoy the video posts, and we’re exploring the use of that media more often. But, we find the videos most useful once we have the issue properly diagnosed in order for our tech to better explain the situation to you.
As for not monitoring and answering mentions of “media temple” in addition to @mediatemple messages, we actually do. During the DNS incident, we received literally thousands of Tweet’s! Normally, we attempt to reply to every message. However, it was just simply not possible during this particular incident, and unfortunately many messages went un-replied to. For this, we apologize. We hope that you understand and appreciate that we are humans, and not (mt) Twitter bots. :)
We hope this helps gives insight into how we communicate with you and how we operate during incidents. Yesterday’s events took time to properly assess and deal with due to the faulty monitoring in place (hence the lack of immediate detailed information.) We appreciate all of your feedback and take it very seriously. Our apologies go out to all of the affected customers. We plan on providing more stability and better transparency in the future.
There have been many issues with Media Temple since last year. Great communication will not be enough in the long run if they continue to use poor technology.
I’m actually disappointed by their communications efforts. While i think they are on the right track the lack of useful information is disappointing. This is a good use of video but where are the updates? Why just one video post? What is happening now – 3 hours later – since my site went down? All I see in terms of status updates is “they are working as fast as they can” on twitter which doesn’t tell me much and the last status update to #1973 on their service site hasn’t been touched in 2 hours.
Kudos do go for them answering direct tweets (@mediatemple) but they don’t seem to be monitoring for “media temple” in general because none of their tweets have shown up there.
I’m also surprised they haven’t issued a press release yet, especially since this seems to be impacting a ton of people. Thankfully we only host our marketing site and email with them and not any critical revenue generating applications. I’m reminded of a few years ago when Rackspace got hit by a truck which was a much bigger issue for cloud based services – at least then we knew exactly what the problem was and why it was taking so long to resolve.
Not so awesome when your company’s not getting the majority of incoming email, terminal servers aren’t connecting because the host names no longer resolve… oh, and same problem with our VPN.
HOORAY!
Allen – I agree that every web service will have some amount of downtime, but the amount of downtime MediaTemple’s experienced in the past 4 months is absurd. No amount of innovative communication tactics can hide the fact the company provides a substandard service. It’s not just me saying this either. Do a search on Twitter for MediaTemple and you’ll see the hundreds (and maybe thousands) of MediaTemple clients who are fed up with the repeated outages.