Curvine Web Solutions Blog

Despite everyone’s best efforts, Web sites sometimes crash. They are victims of malicious attacks that affect there ability to function. Sometimes these outages last for an extended period of time. How a company responds to its clients and customers during this time period is often critical to the business’s reputation.

This is especially true with services where the client is paying a fee to access the service, but it even affects free services such as a blog or corporate Web site where money isn’t changing hands.

As an example, the Consumerist blog has been down for days. It is a popular free Web site where people gripe about their experiences with corporate America. At present, users have been greeted with this message:

Dear Consumerist Readers,

We’d like to take the opportunity to update you on our current technical difficulties and what we plan to do going forward.

We are working (day and night) on an interim solution that will allow us to keep the content coming.

As we mentioned before, it was a tough choice to take the site down while we make changes, but our readers are the most important consideration, and everything we do is with your best interests in mind.

Thanks for your patience, your understanding, and your offers of assistance. Our readers are the best, and anyone who says otherwise probably does PR for Bank of America. We look forward to writing for you again soon.

Yours Truly,
The Consumerist
support@consumerist.com

That fairly nebulous message isn’t keeping its users happy. Users have taken to its Facebook page with messages like:

For a company such as the Consumer Union who’s whole purpose is to not only rate and review products, but to fight for the truth, and make sure the consumers are not left in the dark. I find it highly disturbing that they are in fact no different than any other corporation in america. Sure publish bad things about other companies when they do wrong, but when something bad happens to a publication that is run by the Consumer Union, the consumer union feels there is a double standard and they do not need to be held accountable.

and

If you truly did this with the readers in mind, there would have been more notice, better communication, an insight into what is being done, what we can expect as readers and how you are going to mitigate our concerns.

When an outage affects a large number of people, users of free or even paid services expect the following:

• Honesty: You need to communicate the truth to your users, even if it is unpleasant. For example, if Consumerist was the victim of an attack, they need to say that they were.
• ETA: You want to give people an up-to-date expectation of the site’s restoration. Users know that this may change as you go along, but having an up-to-date ETA would be helpful.
• Where to go: During an outage, the usual location for updates may not be available, so you’ll want to communicate an alternative location for updates, such as Facebook or Twitter. Both can be useful for doing communicating even during an outage.