Power to the People

Last Tuesday, our ISP lost part of their network, knocking out our T1 line and the 100 or so websites we host (inlcuding this one). I spent much of my time on the phone with clients, keeping them informed and reassuring them. Later that evening, we got back online.

Then on Wednesday, I got to do it all again. Outage 3.0 lasted nearly twenty-four hours. People were amazingly understanding (MCI is, after all, an outside utility and utterly out of our control).

One client said “I don’t understand why you’re not on the phone right now, yelling at someone.”

“Actually,” I said, “Someone is on the phone with MCI. But they’re not yelling. It’s been our experience that yelling at someone doesn’t make things better or solve problems faster.”

She replied “Well, you’re experience is different than mine.”

One deep breath later, I said “We appreciate your patience through all of this. I have other people to call, so I will keep you informed…”

This past weekend we went back down again. About thirty hours of radio silence.

Monday, we sent out an e-mail to everyone.

Yesterday, I went to my computer and had a near heart attack when I realized that nothing was coming up. “Are we down again?”

Turns out we weren’t. Turns out that one of the games that we did a few years ago suddenly got very, very hot. As in twenty thousand visitors or more coming to ice fish with Fullmo. So that slowed us down a bit until we moved him to an offsite server. But that was fun thing, people think we do fun stuff and they link to us.

And then this morning . . . the lights started flickering at about 11:00. Then they went out. The whole building went out. The transformer had blown.

So I started making my list of people to call. Fortunately, we have a handful of outlets on one wall that are still up and juiced. So no calls yet.

I’m writing this in the dark, next to a daisy chain of powercords to keep the servers and router powered up. If they go down, I get on the phones.

And now it’s time for lunch…