Vlad pointed out an outage for Live. His questions about what we are learning are worth repeating:
What are we learning here? Or rather, what should we be learning:
- When the service goes down, who is available to help?
- When the service goes down, how long does it take for the support/info request to be acknowledged?
- When the service goes down, do you know exactly where to go to confirm the issue?
- When the service goes down, do you get an ETA of the repair?
- When the service goes down, do you get a refund?
- When the service goes down, does the company offer a plausible excuse for the outage or does it just shrug its shoulders?
- When the service goes down, are you alerted about its recovery when it comes back up?
If you can’t easily answer those questions, you do not have a business solution. You have a best effort solution.
What’s the difference between a business solution and best effort? Well, your business is. Take a look at Sarah Perez’s account when she got locked out of her Gmail and realized there was 0 recourse for her. Woops.
Yesterday I started using Live for my nonprofit work. I have some files I want to share between computers and I have some people I would like to share files with so we can prepare grant applications. So here is my answer to his questions.
I view this problem the same way I view Internet issues with DNS, routing problems, unresponsive email servers, unresponsive web sites, etc. I will work around the problem until it is fixed. Live is not a critical service for me. It is a convenient service that satisfies many non-critical business needs. I am probably making a huge mistake on so many different levels if I am keeping anything out on Live that gets me thinking about service level agreements and security policies.