Web Worker Daily

As we come to rely more and more on web-based applications and services, we’ve all probably had an instance when our favorite experienced some sort of outage. While I think we are generally patient with brief hiccups and such, what would happen if a web service you relied on was down for 16 hours? How should the developers handle the situation?

In what has to be a developer’s worst nightmare, last week a “perfect storm” of events led to just that for task management service Toodledo. Thankfully, after what I am sure was a very long day for the Toodledo team, they were able to bring things back online and with no data loss.

As a user of Toodledo, I was impressed with the outstanding job they did not only recovering our data but for the way they communicated with us during what was really an unthinkable situation. Was it an inconvenience to be without the service? Absolutely it was. But in what really should be a case study in how to respond to such an experience, the folks at Toodledo provided frequent updates and explanations during the outage and a thorough debrief after the fact.

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