All of these mega properties have had recent outages. Where they differ is how they handled those outages and communicated to their community.
Digg’s outage, which I mentioned last week, was brief. They did a decent job of communicating to visitors, explaining that the site was down and that they were working on it, and giving them some lighthearted alternatives to check out while they waited.
MySpace was down twice, ostensibly due to a power outage at their data center in southern California. Hard to imagine an operation that size doesn’t have redundant data centers for just this sort of situation, but hey, it’s the web. They eventually posted a message on their login page informing the millions of angst-ridden MySpacers. Mashable has the details.
Yahoo! Messenger was the other recent outage, down for nine hours on Saturday. What set’s Yahoo apart is that there was no official communication to the millions of affected Yahoo! Messenger users. No acknowledgement of downtime at all. In an age where instant messaging has become a communication lifeline for many, such an outage is difficult. But to neglect to say anything? That’s inexcusable.
Hopefully, Yahoo is listening to its users and learning from this experience.
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