12.23.2005
Compensation for TypePad Outage
Posted by Barak Berkowitz in Announcements
As some of you might know, last week on Thursday night and Friday morning TypePad suffered a severe hardware problem, causing blogs to be inaccessible for two hours and posting to be inaccessible for 16 hours. This was the longest outage in TypePad’s history, and given our performance problems in October I understand why at this point an apology might sound hollow. But the truth is, we are very sorry. The outage, of course, is inexcusable, and for us at Six Apart it was mortifying.
We know that our customers rely on us and expect to receive superior service and performance. Friday last week we didn’t provide that kind of experience, and as a result we will be crediting all active TypePad members with one free week of service. We will apply this to your account by extending your next payment due date by seven days. Customers billed monthly will receive this extension in January; customers billed on an annual basis will have the extension applied to their next billing date.
Over the past ten weeks we had been making great strides towards creating a faster and more reliable TypePad. While not yet perfect, November was better than October, and December was better than November…until last Friday.
While there is always a chance of outages on any web service, the fact is that when you are upgrading systems and moving data you create additional risk. The move to our new data center is paying off, but the frustrating reality is that these changes for long term stability have been painful. In fact this outage was the result of a failure in a device we were installing to provide extra redundancy in our disk storage system. I know it is not a comfort to those of you who were inconvenienced last week, but I’m sure you will appreciate the improved speed and reliability of TypePad.
We’ve also heard from some customers that it can be difficult to find information and announcements from us about TypePad maintenance activities and problems. We are working to improve that, and while we do please bookmark both this blog and status.sixapart.com, which are our two key communication channels.
I want to thank you all for the patience and loyalty so many of you have expressed to me. And I want to make it clear that we understand and share the frustration and anger some of you have been feeling. We are doing everything in our power to avoid ever having a problem on this scale again. That said, problems sometime will happen, but I promise;
We will continue to work hard to lower the risk of you being affected by any problems that may happen behind the scenes.
If you are affected by a problem that we were not able to protect you from, we will clearly and proactively communicate the problem and our estimated time to resolution.
We will work after the problem to analyze its cause, and whenever possible, eliminate the weakness that allowed it to affect you.
Finally, I always appreciate hearing from our customers, especially in times like these. Feel free to email me at Barakb@sixapart.com. I read all these mails and reply to those that need a reply.
This is a great time of the year and we know that next year will bring improved reliability and speed for TypePad. To all of our friends and customers from all of us at Six Apart, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year.
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