500px outage - A lesson in communication.

I noticed yesterday that one of the better photo-sharing websites was down. 500px is quite a new company based in Toronto, and has a reputation as being very user-oriented and friendly, so I thought I’d check out their twitter feed and see what they had to say about their outage. I think it’s something a lot of companies could learn from.

As soon as they’d noticed, they posted this:

This is good – it shows they are being diligent and attempting to work out what went wrong.

Not long after:

This is also good – they are telling their customers a lot here – but mostly that it’s out of their hands.

This went on for quite a few hours and they were being honest, helpful and replying to everyone’s tweets

Quite impressed, I tweeted my feelings out to my followers:

And they immediately thanked me for my support. I think this goes a long way to maintain a company’s reputation when they are having the inevitable technical issues.

They were down for almost 20hrs, but rather than the customers being unhappy about this, they became sympathetic and it was all down to good communication.

This is a lesson that a lot of companies could learn - communication can save your reputation!