Blog That Doesn’t Bother To Update In Times of Emergency
November 13, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Blacknight regularly wins awards for its blog and its use of internet marketing. Today I received a desperate call from a client who is hosting with Blacknight – the Blacknight server Morgana was hacked yesterday. All the information is gone. And shock of all – the last time it was backed up was 27 August.
The client found out by someone notifying them their site was down. I visited the blacknight blog just now and there’s some ego-driven article about ‘me in Seoul’. While the MD is gallivanting around the world, the server has been hacked and no-one is telling customers about what’s going on.
In the meantime, I telephoned Blacknight, got through to someone on support who had no answers, got put through to supervisor (Jonathan) who also had no answers. He told me he didn’t want to disturb the engineers who were fixing the problem by asking them why it hadn’t been backed up since August. As the client facing supervisor, isn’t he supposed to have those kind of answers? The one bit of information in relation to backup that I did manage to extract from him is that all their other servers are backed up everyday. Woopy doo. But can he prove it?
When I asked him how they were notifying clients about this failure in service, he said they posted a notice up to Blacknight Status.com – a first for me, I’ve never heard of that site before, but seemingly I’m supposed to know all about it and I”m even supposed to have RSS feeds so I can keep myself updated as to what calamity has happened next.
Blacknight have failed to deal with this problem effectively in my opinion.
- A blog is not just for vanity stories, it is also an ideal vehicle for communicating when errors have been made.
- A simple email to all clients they know are affected would notify people what’s going on – and possibly even instil some confidence that the issue is being well handled.
- Blacknight are all over Twitter. But there is silence on the Twitterwaves about this.
Once again we see another Irish business who uses social media tools for promotion purposes only. File this one under the same category as The Big Switch who forgot all about their Twitter account when people were urgently contacting them when the laptops and data went missing.
Comments (10 responses)
Totally agree – my site was offline aswell and I would much rather be reading about progress with the issue than some smarmy video about .mobi. Having such an old backup shows that the eye has really been kept off the ball with fundamental data. 00′s worth of data lost on my part.
Alan
I’m definitely not seeing the same Blacknight status blog as you and wonder if your F5 key is inactive. And I’d be surprised to hear that you paid for backup but didn’t receive it. As a Blacknight client, I’d rate their consistent service as high-quality.
While I totally understand the frustration of losing data, the onus is on the customer to backup their own data.
Most hosting companies have an external ‘status’ website which should serve as a form of communicating if their is a large issue with the internal network/systems.
In this case, the first I heard of an issue was via a friend who also lost data on the server, and secondly via twitter from you, both cases where the lack of comms from BK were the main issue.
I can see your frustration at losing data, but it’s always been the clients responsibility to manage their own backups.
There are plenty of tools available in the control panel to manage backups and of course Blacknight also offer many different backup services if these aren’t good enough. Since you don’t seem to have any backups for your client, I’d be thanking my lucky stars that Blacknight do, albeit old.
In relation to their blog – they’ve had the BlacknightStatus.com for quite sometime and regularly reference it on their main blog. If you had been keeping up with their main blog, you would have seen many posts pointing you to this blog. It was set up in a different location for obvious reasons.
One thing is fair though – the phone conversion seemed to be a little weird to say the least… I have to say, I have never encountered anything like this from Blacknight before.
Fundamentally, not having backups for the last three months for that server was a mistake and a pretty unforgivable thing for a hosting provider to do. Blacknight should simply admit that, apologise and move on.
The client has an IT company that looks after backups, etc. We simply delivered the website. What my beef was is the way this crisis was handled and the lack of information that frontline staff had. This could have gone either way – if they’d given me information and a feeling that they were on to it, I”d have happily written about that here and on Twitter. I’m only sorry that once again, poor customer service from a leading Irish company, leads me to be Miss Narky Knickers again.
As Tom said Blacknight do mention their status blog often and I believe they emailed all customers a while back when it launched.
@Alan @Tom @Barry. The point I was making was that Blacknight did not use any of their myriad tools for engaging with customers about a serious breach of service. That they have 1 dedicated site to post information of this kind is not the point. The point is that they also have a wide array of other tools open to them and they did not use them. So I conclude that Blacknight uses Twitter, etc for marketing promotion only, not as customer service or communication devices. As long as I now know that, I won’t be stupid enough to rely on them any longer.
@Maryrose – The fact that they have a dedicated site for things like this, is quite an important point since the title of your article is “Blog That Doesn’t Bother To Update In Times of Emergency”, which is entirely incorrect as you were looking at the wrong one.
Looking at Blacknight’s Twitter profile, it looks to me like they use it for both. Whether they are consistent is another days work altogether…
@Maryrose The front page of their main website has the Blacknight Status section on it though with a link to the post about the server being down.
The main company blog is a marketing tool and as such shouldn’t really mention outages. At least if my own site had a blog I wouldn’t use it to post about downtime. Similarly you wouldn’t post on here about websites being down for you would you ?
If the main blog was used to report downtime / DNS issues / mail issues or whatever it could potentially have a negative impact on getting customers. You’d also have to sift through the promotional material to get at network outages notifications.
You’ll also find status pages are normally held outside the main network. (Which I believe is so in this case as well) No point reporting outages on the blacknight blog if there were DNS issues for example which meant people couldn’t get at it
I also find the twitter account for the most part informs on outages and any issues as well as providing some nice interaction when I don’t want to email support on potentially a more generic query. It doesn’t however repeat the same down time messages ad nausium.
As you can tell I’m a fan and have never had any major problems and they were great helping me get back some data I’d lost going above and beyond the call in that case which was very nice of them.
As to the support guys not knowing whats going on I don’t know what to say there but I know if I’m trying to fix something and under pressure I’ll be a cranky so and so
and being interruped all the time doesn’t help (I’m talking about the engineers fixing the problems in the background here) so potentially there wasn’t enough communication to them. I’m not sure … my systems weren’t affected by the outage thankfully.
On a slightly different note .. I’m now waiting 1 week 4 days on a support issue with a UK crowd uk2.net .. and I find the BK guys normally respond to tickets within an hour or two.
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