I was having a nightmare! Not only had I lost my broadband (as I write this, ten days later, it is still not live) but the cursor on my beloved chromebook kept freezing, to the point that I had to send the whole thing back to the manufacturer (as I write this, ten days later, it has still not been collected). The day could only get better until I found that Google was suffering from some global access problems and Zoom had gone AWOL.
Technology is great when it works but when it doesn’t we are paralysed. Perhaps this should be a lesson to us all.
All of these issues were concerning to me though I was able to use 4G to connect, my old Chromebook (old faithful) to work on and the Google problems were short-lived. Zoom, on the other hand, was uppermost in my mind as #CyberFest is just around the corner and the majority of events are going to be through that medium.
What happens if it goes down during the North East’s biggest cybersecurity festival? Should I make alternative arrangements or just keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best?
Anyway, the day after I got this email:
Dear Valued Zoom Customer,
As you may know, at 4:56 am PDT today, August 24, Zoom experienced a partial disruption of our Meeting, Webinar, and website services. We largely restored service by 8:26 am PDT. We have determined that the cause of this service disruption was related to an application-level bug in our system, which resulted in a web login issue for customers.
The email went on to say how they were sorry and valued my business etc. It was a great email, from the President of Product and Engineering, no less and showed me what good customer response is like when something goes wrong, open, honest, apologetic and timely.
He had included his email address and so wrote to him to thank him for letting me know and the speedy resolution. I didn’t expect it but he wrote back, with a thanks Phil.
Remember, technology is a people business.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 