On Tuesday morning the Google Mail service experienced one of its longest outages since the service began. While we are not responsible for the state of Google’s servers we have recommended that a number of other businesses make use of Google Apps and naturally felt anxious about the outage. At toggle we are huge fans of the service, we use it ourselves and the tools have saved us both money and time. We will continue to recommend the service to our clients.
The incident got us thinking about ways in which we can better communicate service issues to our clients. Before Tuesday we had been relying on an small status message on the hosting page of our website which was accompanied by an RSS feed. While this worked for announcing planned server maintenance it was not much use in emergencies. Last October our main server suffered a hard disk failure on both disks, the server was taken offline immediately and repaired within two hours. During those two hours our site was not reachable and we could not update the service message to inform people of the outage. We had considered moving the updates to an email based system, however during the Google outage email was not a viable option.
Today I am pleased to announce a new way in which we will be delivering our service notifications: Twitter. Using Twitter we can deliver the status updates in a number of ways and as the system lives away from our core technology it should be online when our site is not. Here are the options for following the updates:
- You can subscribe via RSS.
- You can subscribe via email.
- You can follow the account on your Twitter.
- You can check the support section on our website.
- You can visit our Twitter page directly.
Twitter offers a simple, concise messaging system for delivering service updates and while it has a reputation for being slightly flaky, it has now overcome the majority of its growing pains.
Update: In response to Tuesdays downtime Google have now launched their own service status website. Once an RSS feed is available for this we will pipe it into our support Twitter account.