3 ms·

Hopefully next time we have to apologize for something going wrong we'll be able to do a better job than the standard "We apologize for the inconvenience" reply

• henning 18y ago
  here's how a company such as yours can do better (i'm addressing a web app company in general, not 37s in particular): * reassure users that the service was "merely" unavailable and no data was lost (i think you already do this) * explain specifically what happened and why to the best of your knowledge (i think you already do this) * explain specifically what you're going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again, within reason * if the downtime is extensive, give paying users a free month or whatever of service (i think you would already do this), within reason
  • jwilliams 18y ago
    I agree that explaining the reasons/remediation is a good idea. If you pay X for a service, generally you'll have an idea of the service level and value you expect. I think most people are reasonable about this. Customers that go off the rails (no pun intended) because of an outage in a free/inexpensive service are probably customers you don't want to have.
• tptacek 18y ago
  You met your standard last time: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-morning http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-mo... (Although the Rackspace comment might have been a tactical error). I was impressed with the post today, is why I commented.
• lnguyen 18y ago
  I'd suggest thirty-foot high letters of fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Preliumtarn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guid...