Ok, well the broken stuff for today (so far) includes Digg and Yahoo Small Business.
Digg appears to be a partial failure, which is probably the most common in the SaaS and enterprise worlds (as I discussed yesterday). While much of the mainstream functionality seems to continue working, much of the stuff that differentiates Digg (adds its personality, so to speak) is missing in action.
Interestingly enough, as I talked about a few months ago these are precisely the sort of functions that Digg's dbas are proud of working hard to suppress. I understand that these can be difficult to scale (at least in old-school db-centric implementations that is!), but the business needs them to add value.
And now these value-added functions are gone.
The good news? It could be worse - at least Digg is doing this to themselves. Yahoo, on the other hand ...
Yahoo Acts Like a ...
Yahoo's small business merchant operations had many problems on "Cyber Monday". In the words of Rich Riley (Yahoo Small Business): (emphasis mine)
On Monday at 6:00AM PT, the systems that power our merchant stores experienced outages, and shoppers of those stores were met with either error messages or they were unable to complete the checkout process ...
These issues lasted until about 1:00PM PT
Other than that things were fine.
The Good News
One bit of good news is that both companies have talked a bit about having the problems. Perhaps it's because the problems themselves affect such a high percentage of their customer bases - they're just too prevalent to ignore.
The Bad News
Are you kidding me?!??!?!? Both of these SaaS offerings are broken. While Digg is sort-of-working (in a limp-home sort of way), the poor unfortunate merchants who believed and relied upon the promises of Yahoo Small Business have just suffered major losses.
Not even an SLA would do much good here. Check out some of the comments to Riley's fessin' up:
This outage cost us big time in terms of money, our time and customer goodwill ... Yahoo! should immediately come up with a plan to compensate merchants for this disruption of service on the most highly publicized day of online shopping.
Just telling us the time line of what happened isn’t very useful. We already know that as we watched it happen and suffered the lost business because of it.
Please also give me a good reason(s) why I shouldn’t switch to a different shopping cart provider at my earliest opportunity.this was catastrophic…
Why is there no redundancy? I have lost faith.
it will take a class action suit for it to be addressed unfortunately :(
The justifiable outrage goes on and on and on. After all, what's a merchant going to get back ... part of a day's hosting fee? As if that would compensate for half a day's lost sales during the make-or-break time of the year for most merchants!
This is Getting Ridiculous
As an industry we just have to do better ... customers have a right to expect better, and we must deliver. Talking about reliability and SLAs is simply not enough ... we need to get it done.
Btw, this business of broken SaaS offerings is becoming such a common occurrence that I've added a new category to this blog, for your convenience. All posts will be marked with the "mad kitty" (I'll explain later), & I think I'll probably go ahead and add a tab as well, because I'm pretty sure this topic is simply not going away for the foreseeable future (unfortunately).
