Yesterday I wrote an open letter on behalf of all Media Temple users that suffered during the huge outage over the weekend. As promised, Media Temple have emailed me directly to respond, I post that response in full below.

It’s great to see that MT are listening, and it sounds like positive change is definitely going to happen!

MT Official Response

Thanks for the insightful critique of our response to this weekend’s unfortunate outage.

Regarding our Twitter usage:

You made some good points regarding the volume of our Twitter response.  We most definitely could have responded more frequently and with more user friendly verbiage from the mt_monitor account (which did post updates about every hour).

Our “Twitter strategy” is still very young and we’re literally working on being better at it every day.  Twitter is interesting medium as micro conversations happen in so many different channels, it’s literally impossible to tweet enough to satisfy everyone’s expectations in terms of volume, personal response and information provided.

One very important point here is during an outage of this magnitude, our entire admin staff is dedicated 100% to working on the Grid, and at times, can not simply deliver the information we need to disclose to the public.  This is a constant struggle for many service providers and again, we’re working on improving this constantly.

Regarding the mass email:

Yes, we definitely should have sent an email to all affected customers.  It is normal procedure for us to do this, but in this case, the outage was so severe, we did not have the staff bandwidth to make it happen.

Regarding Remuneration:

This is being handled post haste.

Overview Posted to Blog:

After getting the issue handled, we then put the appropriate amount of effort into creating a more detailed explanation of what happened here:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/2009-02-28-cluster-2-unavailable/

In conclusion, we agree with you our communications could have been better.  We are a dynamic company that tries to stay proactive in terms of technology and communications, in this case we got caught behind the ball. We’re already implementing changes in communications strategy to avoid this happening again.

Jason McVearry
(mt) Media Temple
Community Director

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 and is filed under Service Management, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.