Hi. Copper was down today. Sad. Face.
Yesterday we had 30 minutes of downtime after a DOS attack, and today we had a whopping 7 hours of downtime trying to migrate to faster servers.
Previously, we’d had an impressive 18 months of uninterrupted service, and 2 years of uninterrupted service before that!
Now, when your car is in the shop for 7 hours, it doesn’t seem so bad, but when thousands of organizations can’t get access to their data, it sucks.
What happened? Well. the migration hit a snag, and it took us a long time to detect and fix the problem.
The service is now better than ever, but in the process I’ve learned some valuable lessons, some that may surprise you.
1. Real humans (you) use Copper! Wow! When things are working you never hear from people and it seems like nobody really cares. But when something goes wrong, real humans and their projects are affected. I didn’t like hearing you weren’t able to use your Copper, but I liked being reminded that our tool is uber-important to people. It furthers my resolve to make things better.
2. My heart rate was at an elevated 120-130 bpm. My anxiety levels soared, I felt like Elliot in E.T. feeling the alien’s pain by proxy. I was sharing your collective frustration. The lesson here, server outages are good for weight loss, but keep your beloved customers informed so that they don’t stress. We gave personal replies to everyone who wrote/called/tweeted asking what was going on during and after the downtime.
3. Stay on the phone with your techs. Don’t give anyone room to dawdle, simply sit with the person who can fix the problem until that little green light lets you know all is right with the world.
Thank you to our wonderful customers for their patience, our diligent and attentive tech team for their character under pressure, and to the wonderful internet for teaching us these lessons.
Now, for a coffee and a biscuit.
Regards,
Ben Prendergast
CEO
Element Software
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