An Internet Outage

It was pretty bad, last week, when Typepad went down, and we had to go an entire day without blogging.  Actually it wasn't even a whole day.  However, it can't have been as bad as what the customers of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) were going through when their hosted business software went down this week:

A Salesforce.com outage lasting nearly a day cut off access to critical business data for many of the company's customers on Tuesday in what appears to be Salesforce's most severe service disruption to date.

Salesforce stores customer information for thousands of businesses, delivering data "on-demand" via the web. The lack of that data interfered with some customers' sales and customer service activities on a critical pre-holiday business day.

Charlie Crystle, CEO of Mission Research, a software company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said: "This is not just an inconvenience. We're losing sales. It's a busy time of the year."

A Salesforce spokesman said he doesn't know how many of Salesforce's 18,700 customers were affected by the outage, which began at about 06:30(PST). The cause was a faulty database, which was repaired by about 14:00(PST), he said.

The spokesman said: "We apologies to any customer who was inconvenienced by this. We take that very, very seriously."

It's clear the problem was not isolated. Complaints from affected customers have surfaced across the web, including on several blogs.

Given the raging debate between local/hosted software and thin/thick clients, it's obvious to see how an event like this will play out. 

From our perspective, it's not a problem with the internet, or hosting, per se (every time of system crashes), but a matter of centralization vs. decentralization. 

When Typepad went down, every Typepad blog went down.  This couldn't happen with the blogs running Movable Type, blog software produced by the same company, because those blogs are on thousands of different hosts around the world.  Again, one event, and one example don't even begin to conclude anything, but they are important situations to consider

Comments

[dahowlett]

On a corrective note, one of my reasders pointed out there was no similar outtage in Europe.

These kinds of event will continue to attract attention as people probe the robustness with which some of these services have been endowed - or not as the case may be. The ones to really watch are the infrastructure providers.

I rather suspect the whole thing will be worked out this year with a number of commercial ventures either withering or being folded into larger operations. We've already seen the first salvo in that war with both MT and WP ending up as hosted by infrastructure giant Yahoo!

One potential side effect is that marketers and PRs who are pimping this stuff are going to find it hard to know where to aim their sights next. It's all very well saying everyone has a blog so corporates must engage. But it's a different matter altogether when it comes to execution. That distinction will become increasingly obvious as time passes, throwing forward many interesting challenges.

Of cours if the so-called buble bursts, then we might be faced with altogether different scenarios.

[dahowlett]

On a corrective note, one of my reasders pointed out there was no similar outtage in Europe.

These kinds of event will continue to attract attention as people probe the robustness with which some of these services have been endowed - or not as the case may be. The ones to really watch are the infrastructure providers.

I rather suspect the whole thing will be worked out this year with a number of commercial ventures either withering or being folded into larger operations. We've already seen the first salvo in that war with both MT and WP ending up as hosted by infrastructure giant Yahoo!

One potential side effect is that marketers and PRs who are pimping this stuff are going to find it hard to know where to aim their sights next. It's all very well saying everyone has a blog so corporates must engage. But it's a different matter altogether when it comes to execution. That distinction will become increasingly obvious as time passes, throwing forward many interesting challenges.

Of course if the so-called bubble bursts, then we might be faced with altogether different scenarios.

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