Comments on: Amazon Does the Right Thing

By: Paul Carney

Paul Carney — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:09:49 +0000

I don’t agree that a “sorry” was necessary. They outlined in very specific detail as to what happened and how they are going to try (operative word) to avoid it in the future. That is what I would expect of a business that I depend on at this level.

As for the details being “technical” and not “customer-facing”, this is what we need. The issue was not a business issue, but a very technical one. This explanation shows that they figured it out and solved it. The post was not meant to be a business post.

I have experienced similar types of outages from our hosting provider (where we have 8 servers that operate 24/7 for our 15,000 clients), so I know how important an outage is. Amazon’s explanation was spot-on, necessary and accepted. No need to say “sorry”, but more importantly, “here is how we are going to try to avoid this in the future”.

By: Sam Denby

Sam Denby — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:11:36 +0000

I am a user of S3 and I have many years experience with problem and crisis management in large data centers. Amazon have posted a model report which explains what happened, looks for root causes and identifies actions in place to tackle them. I agree that saying sorry would have been good, but I think this was posted by engineers focused on the problem, rather than customer-facing people.

By: Mike Gunderloy

Mike Gunderloy — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:02:28 +0000

@Matt: If you check the times involved, you’ll see that our coverage of the refund process was posted before they made the policy exception for this outage.

As for the apology, when a service with a 99.9% SLA misses badly, I think it’s only good form to tell your customers that you’re sorry about the downtime. YMMV, I guess.

By: Matt Hussein Platte

Matt Hussein Platte — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:55:59 +0000

Why should they be sorry about anything? More to the point, why do you think this is a situation that requires an apology? Early on you were beating up on Amazon because of their cynical fill-out-the-forms attitude regarding the refund. Now that you’ve discovered your error WRT the refund, it seems that the apology might best be turned around.