Tech Interrupted: Learning from Rackspace and T-Mobile
T-Mobile experienced a minor glitch recently which left about two million users out of service. Tweets started pouring in about news which followed the said outage. On Monday night, Rackspace, a managed hosting company, also encountered technical difficulties taking clients out for hours on end. What is interesting about these happenings is the differences in the way the companies handled the problem and how much publicity they attracted.A search through Google regarding the T-Mobile outage will bring back more than 250 articles on it. On the other hand, the outage experienced by Rackspace, even when it affected known sites such as Daily Booth, TechCrunch and Posterous only had 11 article listings. The popularity that the T-Mobile outage garnered is reflective of how consumer-oriented its service is. So first rule for consumer-facing services is: you have to get your PR people on Twitter, blogs, and the newspaper circuits, providing statements and remedies as soon as the outage starts. The second lesson lies on how the events were addressed. When it came to addressing the outage, T-Mobile offered fairly regular updates. However, it didn’t provide information on what happened. On the other hand, Rackspace featured a detailed status page, offering information on what was wrong with the system and what the company is doing to get it fixed. Rackspace also provided an option for customers to call up real people.Other enterprise-focused service providers should take a page out of Rackspace’s book particularly for delivering cloud services. Google, for instance, caused a lot of users to grow frustrated when the technology provider didn’t offer sufficient information when they experienced a App Engine platform problem in July.
