Unfortunately today techAU had its longest outage since launching. After around 9 long hours, the site is finally back up and running. Obviously having the site offline for any length of time is incredibly frustrating and frankly unnacceptable. I want to make this clear, today’s downtime was due to issues with the current host AustDomains, not with techAU. I’ve decided to call them out in an effort to get them to share more information on the issue.
Despite having various social networks available to them, AustDomains left customers in the dark, with no response to emails, phone calls and worst of all no ETA. During the outage many other AustDomains customers began discussing the outage online, without a whisper from AustDomains. This is a major failing in customer service and I sincerely hope they use today’s outage as an example of how not to handle a disaster.
At 8:10pm customers received an email from AustDomains giving a vague explanation of what occurred today.
Dear Customers,
Customer Outage – Resolved, 22 June 2010
Unfortunately we have been experiencing some packet loss of both our primary and secondary data links. This affected most of the network, client websites/services, including our support phone and email systems. This outage meant we could not provide a prompt notice, either directly or via our website.
This issue has since been resolved and safe guards been put in place to prevent future reoccurrence.
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this would have caused.
techAU is investigating alternate solutions to ensure this doesn’t happen ever again. Once again, I’d like to apologise to our readers.
