The Week of Technology from Hell

Posted by Matt Singley on July 4, 2009 under Technology | Be the First to Comment

This has been an incredibly difficult week for me in terms of technology. Having to rely on services that are out of my control can get challenging, especially when they all go bad at once.

Early this week Time Warner Cable went out in my area (and most of Los Angeles I understand), then my Twitter account was mysteriously suspended for half a day, and finally yesterday my email service was out all day…a day that I was waiting for some mission critical messages.

It seems that I wasn’t the only one affected on Friday, there was a fire in a major data center in Seattle where my email is hosted.  Techflash did a good job of posting updates on their site throughout the day regarding the massive outage at the Fisher Plaza.  Among the notable sites that had problems were Bing Travel and Authorize.net, an online credit card processing service.  For a fairly complete list of domains that were affected, take a look at Kyle Mulka’s blog, he did an excellent job of compiling the list.  You can follow him on Twitter as well if you would like.

As far as we have come with technology over the last several years, I’m still stunned at the lack of redundant systems that are available.  I have been preaching redundancy and backups for at least a decade, and even though I’m aware of what to do…sometimes there are so many system failures in place that it can just become overwhelming.  I’m happy to report that in all of this mess, the only data I lost was a day’s worth of email (completely out of my control, although I should have changed my DNS the moment I found out it was a data center fire), and none of my personal or client projects were lost.  Between cloud services like Dropbox and Mozy, and my own personal systems (like an automated 2TB onsite backup) all is well again.

I hope your week of technology was better than mine, and here’s looking forward to next week being flawless!

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