There are a number of different ways to inform your customers of an outage. I’ve previously discussed how 365main and Amazon Web Services did this fairly well in the past. Unfortunately, Limelight Networks customers are hearing about issues with their CDN via GigaOM.
There’s much that can be said about how to do this right, but a few tips I use myself in these situations:
- Timely: tell your customers what you’re certain of as early as reasonable
- Unbiased: don’t speculate or editorialize, just the facts
- Clear: avoid using unnecessary jargon or technical terms
- Regular: keep communicating until the issue is over
Remember, this sort of issue happens from time to time with any service — concentrate on supporting your customers and your people.
Tags: cdn, operations, outages