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Ask Slashdot: How Long Do We Give an Online Service To Fix Issues?
ncc189 writes "The Funimation Roku channel has been basically unusable during primetime for about a month now. With very little feedback from the company and no improvements to the service at all, I canceled my account. My question to Slashdot users is: how long do you give a service to fix issues before you cancel the service, and how much leeway do you give the service's representatives in communicating issue with us? It seems to me that a few days is more than enough in the internet age; 3+ weeks is beyond reason. How long do you think is fair for services like this?"
Is the "online service" Oracle?
More anime than what Funimation has on Netflix perhaps? Now you've given them free advertising, and I might just go sign up.
Morphing Software
If I pay for it, they better be telling me something reasonably accurate
If I dont, then they dont owe me squat and it will be back when its back
I've got low tolerance for things like this. Just about all companies try to rip you off in one way or the other. I've become frustrated and just keep my money. Fuck em.
yes 3 years before they sent an AT&T person to my house to look at the wires. He then fixed it in minutes. It now works fine. Yes I still have DSL only because my Comcast cable TV goes out monthly. At least if I loose cable I can still watch netflix, hulu and online stuff.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I assure you there are folks who would give any service of their choosing as much time as they like if they think it's worth while to wait. Can be three weeks like for you or it can be maybe a few months even. Loyalty is a personal thing, but companies that do poorly with service tend not to have many clients/customers unless they offer something unique and/or interesting. And loyalty is very fickle.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
One of the problems that irks me is that companies are doing the same thing with their hardware products also. They're sold as firmware upgradable but then there are many companies that even if they do deliver a token "upgrade" here or there, they're still full of bugs. Without loss of generality here, I'll mention that I faced this problem with the original WD TV HD. Sold as firmware upgradable but had lots of bugs. I held out for firmware upgrades to address my A/V sync issues, other bug fixes, and maybe an enhancement or two (usb network dongle support would have been nice). Shortly after, I see new products (5 or so in a year) released by WD that address some of these issue. So much for firmware upgradable.
If it goes beyond 5 days I would expect a reduced bill for the time the service was unusable that month. If I didn't get one I would definitely cancel.
See facebook, that had for years privacy issues, and instead of fixing them they kept getting worse. Now, ask the people that is still there your question.
I cancelled my Netflix account immediately after they raised my rates sans authorization and their CEO said in the newspaper "Let them drink large lattes."
I give corporations zero leeway. I pay for a service. If it changes sans authorization/notification, they can fuck off. If they lose the ability to provide the service, they can fuck off.
More people should tolerate less delays for things like this, but, sadly including myself among this majority, it's usually just too much of a hassle to cancel the service and re-join when they finally fix the issues. Also depends how severe the issues are (are they debilitating or just minor inconveniences), how much I pay per month, etc.
It's called an SLA, if the service doesn't provide one go somewhere that does.
If there are alternatives, then the wait will probably be short. If there aren't, then you should suck it up as long as you can.
Keep in mind, if you pay for service and they don't provide it, you are due a refund. This is quite separate from whether or not you choose to do business with them in the future.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Taking into account that I'm neither a "baby boomer" nor was I raised on TV; I had to walk several blocks to watch TV at a friends house and only one channel from a distant station was watchable.
In a practical sense, the third or fourth time I fail to connect - if I remember.
It is amazing someone didn't roll out a similar site to take over all of their userbase
This is such a vague question that it cannot be answered in a sensible way. It depends on the service, and alternatives. If I have no alternatives, I am out of luck. On the other hand, if there are dozens of options, I'd switch as soon as I believe the alternatives would provide better value for money. If it is a critical service (depending on the application), even a few minutes might be catastrophic.
The re-compensation issue should be dealt with in the service level agreements/TOS (including no-cost cancellations).
As for communicating problems, I'd expect to be kept in the loop - each time they make a new estimate of restoration time, I should be send a notification by my medium of choice. It is unacceptable that a paying client have no idea when service would be restored. Obviously, as problems are discovered, the estimate will be modified. But I still would want to have the latest estimate (especially for work-related services).
I know this is a little bit like sneering, but how appropriate that this question to the Slashdot community was inspired by Funimation Roku.
If I get something for free, then obviously not an issue. File a bug report, and if they don't fix it before you lose interest, move on, but you can't really complain too much about it.
If I pay for a service, then my willingness to put up with outages depends entirely on their willingness to not charge me during downtimes.
Now, if I need the service in question, they only get a few days before I find someone else to provide it, regardless of free or not.
Note that this assumes having no real contract in place specifying an SLA. If you have that, then you have the acceptable downtimes and repercussions for exceeding them all nice and neatly spelled out.
My willingness to give them a chance would depend on a number of things:
ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot, since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause of the problem. What is reasonable, though, is timely customer feedback.
Sorry, but 100% wrong. Yeah, timely feedback (including the magic phrase "prorated refund for downtime") will buy you a few days (at most). But if I actually pay for your service, I don't give two shits if your only datacenter just got hit by a Tsunami - Get your service back up now, or by next week your competition will provide it for me.
> since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause
The speed of resolution is dependent upon many things, including their competency, how well they *planned* for disruptions in advance and even how many employees they have. If they're just bottom fishers, a couple of guys running a service on an old Dell in their grandmother's basement, maybe I shouldn't EXPECT a quick resolution ... but then, they shouldn't EXPECT to stay in business.
Sometimes things happen that you can't plan for, but they have a tendency to affect a lot of other services at the same time. Hurricane Sandy knocked out a bunch of stuff Up Nawth. (The company that I do freelance writing had already scheduled me to do an article on transmitter efficiency, then disappeared: their mail service provider was underwater.) Fine; I understand and I can be patient.
I'd need to see evidence that the OP's outage isn't caused by stinginess (refusal to have backup systems for 'zample) or just plain incompetence.
Hate to say it, but speaking from experience, almost anytime you see a business go down and stay down for weeks on end, it's either because the Russians have invaded, or they're in deep money trouble and have to scrounge for the bucks to replace the dead stuff. I rather suspect that the latter is the case here for the OP. In that case, yes, I cancel and go elsewhere. Too bad, they have my sympathies ... but they no longer have my money, either.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
your own question
"about a month"
The Funimation Roku channel has been basically unusable during primetime for about a month now.
ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot
You're a raging douchebag.
It doesn't seem to me that you're a raging douchebag, no - you are a raging douchebag.
Basic economy theorem: elasticity. Can you find similar service somewhere else at competitive pricing? Then why not get the $ out ritta way?
I too am a DSL user (up in the great white north) the lines are over 50 years old here so we have the bell guy up a ladder at least 3 times a year. They usually get to it within a day but they never really fix the problem.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
It took Verizon *eight* years, so far, to fix a POTS problem for me. They couldn't find my (temporary) house and never installed the phone, so I cancelled the order and got my first cell phone instead. Later on I found they had changed my listing in the paper phone book to the new address, with the phone number that I never received. After a few months I moved back to my own house, but the phone book was wrong for the next 7+ years. Just checked the most recent paper phone book and it still has that wrong number along with another number I had for 19.2kb dialup access, which I cancelled at least a decade, maybe 15 years ago, and still doesn't have my real phone number (which is OK because I transferred it to another carrier several years ago).
At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'd prefer to make it a race between them and the competition
If it's not critical or I immedeatly think I can replace it (even if service itself thinks they are unique): 1 days(and for it doesn't matter if it's happen on USA Independence Day or Chinese New Year), to get at least some response on what's going on. 1 week to fully solve issue. if it's critical...start with above but will scout net for replacements, if where are REALLY no replacements...will try to make as much public uproar as possible to make issue fixed last 2 real issues with paid-for services: - first one - 3 tickets, about a week, end result - replacement for necessary functionality found for same price. account disabled on old service - 2nd one, in 2 days from time I was actually aware of issue:e-mail about my usage trigger error in their code. they are investingating and be back soon. (this look plausible for me given service nature and my data's nature). as apology for issue they give some free time on same billing plan I was on.
I lost all service from my cable provider for 10 days in November last year.
That was a serious inconvenience. However since it was due to a natural disaster I could hardly blame them.
There is no room for empathy in the business world. If you can't provide for any reason, your competitors will be happy to take over your place. Survival of the fittest and all that...
24 hours for a message explaining the issue, or the fact there is an issue
48 hour updates on how the issue resolution is going
After 1 week a full month refund with no questions
Down time longer then two weeks, ask the community for help.
If a customer service rep says something to me like "I'm sorry about this. It's our fault and we're trying to correct it as soon as possible." that goes a long way, and will buy them some time (the amount of time depending on how critical this service is to me). Even more important is getting *real* tech support when you need it. A warm body answering the phone and telling me they will pass it along to someone else is not sufficient. If I have those two things I'll be very forgiving, because I know how hard it is to get them.
Back in the day, my dial up internet provider was bought by another company that was obviously unprepared to handle the workload. It was pretty bad, so I tried to cancel. The service was down constantly, the customer support line was always busy, and the answering service message was "this voice mailbox is full". Emails bounced back with "this user is over the quota", and there was no other way to contact them. Even a registered letter was never picked up because the post office was unable to make delivery. Apparently they decided that it wasn't important to have live people, a physical office, or any contact at all with their customers. It took 2 months to make them quit billing me. After finally managing to cancel my service, I sent them a goodbye present to the corporate office. It was a medium size box lined with plastic, and filled with all the dog feces I could collect from my back yard, and a laminated picture of a random guy flipping the bird. The note said "Thanks for the shitty service".
On the other end of the spectrum, my current web hosting service had some issues that caused them to shift servers proactively for performance reasons. One of my PHP scripts broke, and I contacted support via chat. The guy who answered got the URL from me, looked at the code, and helped me fix it on the spot. It really wasn't even their problem. It was crappy coding on my part. That's the only time I've ever had to talk to their support in 10 years, so I don't know if that's typical or not. Because of that, I'd stay with them if they were out for a month, maybe even two.
Empathy has nothing at all to do with it. I can feel bad for a destroyed data center owner but that feeling does not negate the reason and purpose for using them in the first place. the bottom line is that there is no reason to have an ISP that doesn't allow you to get online, there is no reason to keep buying bus tokens when you do not ride the bus, and there is no reason to continue paying for an online service when they cannot deliver whatever it is that you needed in the first place. In most cases, if the service or whatever was needed, it will likely need to be usable therefore replicated when the service isn't provided. Being sad or feeling sorry for the service doesn't change that.
Funimation has had ongoing problems with their website for over a year. They continually have problems with site performance, video player performance and have pretty routine crashes. They have been calling their website Beta since 2011.
A friend of mine has an issue where someone is posing as her on Facebook with a well-photoshopped picture of a woman standing in just panties with my friend's face shopped on (lighting and shadows added). The fake account keeps making friend requests to her real friends. This has been going on for nearly a week, and she and many others have reported the profile as fake, impersonating her, and the profile picture as against FB policy, but no one from Facebook is doing anything, possibly because some tier 1 flunky sees the names don't match and assumes no impersonation is occurring. How long before this become's FB's problem from a legal standpoint since they're tacitly supporting the behavior?
FYI, before someone jumps in saying "this is why I don't use Facebook", this can happen even easier to someone who doesn't use Facebook, and it would be theorically harder to clear up.
This is plus 5 Insightful? More like plus 5 Sad. Or are most people here Americans with scientifically proven zero empathy.
"Empathy" means the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fellow human. Mitt's assertions to the contrary aside, "businesses are [not] people too". So empathy has nothing to do with it.
A business exists solely for the exchange of goods and/or services for money (or other goods and/or services). If a business can't provide me with the goods and/or services I want, they have no reason to continue to exist for all it matters to me. I would only even give them that few days I mentioned to restore service, as a matter of convenience to me - If I could realistically switch ISPs, for example, 15 seconds after discovering my internet had gone down again, Verizon could kiss my hairy white ass goodbye.
Now if you want to talk about loyalty - I have loyalty to my friends. I have loyalty to my family. I have loyalty to people that have given me a reason to care about them. The company that, despite my opting out of everything possible on their privacy policy still has their "partners" send me life insurance offers once a month? Yeah, not so much loyalty there - More like "simmering resentment" that such complete bastards manage to have the best game in town.
I have dsl in dc from verizon now, and service started getting worse about two years ago, and is now really bad. There are half days and sometimes full days when the connection drops and cannot be maintained, tho it will connect again for a minute or so, which is enough to get mail. My understanding from the bloomberg articles by Susan Crawford http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-25/merger-made-comcast-strong-u-s-web-users-weak.html is that it's a capacity problem caused by monopoly collusion between Verizon and Comcast: Verizon makes more money from smartphones, so Verizon is letting its dsl capacity go to hell while increasing wifi capacity. Of course, Verizon stopped extending fiber in dc before it reached my neighborhood (same lousy collusion), so that's out. I was taking online classes in Japanese, and sometimes it seemed to help if I called Verizon and begged them to "shift me to the good network" -- I'd have an hour or so to take my class. Unfortunately, I believe my only alternative is Comcast, which I believe is limiting capacity and trying to force everyone to use its movies, which don't count against the monthly limit. I really hate that -- I'm old, I remember IBM, Ma Bell, AOL, all the other monopolists (now I think Google and Facebook are heading that way). It's a case study in Acemoglu and Robinson's "Why Nations Fail" -- the U.S. won't modernize to fiber because of powerful economic groups with congressmen in their pockets. Sorry about the rant, but this is a very sore point with me!
You get and keep phone books?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Generally, I'll sample during a trial because that's a freebie. If I've paid in, they get that cycle to sell me.
Blogging because I can...
Case in point is Sirius Satellite Radio. last year just before I paid for the next year they dropped a station that happened to be what I mostly listened to. When I called them up, they offered a reduced rate. This year when it was time to renew, I called them up and they again offered me a discounted rate. I'm still with them because I am paying what I consider is fair for the service. If they do not offer me a discount next year I will drop it.
I found that if you disable auto-renew, then when it's renewal time they don't cut you off for a few weeks while they try desperately to contact you. After a week or so, finally answer the phone and tell them their service is too expensive. Every year, they "check" with a retention supervisor and then offer me a reduced rate of ~$6/mo if I prepay for a year. That's less than 1/2 of their regular rate.
Ask the native american indians how much empathy corporations and governments gave them.
The answer depends on how many other options you have. In my neighborhood, Comcast is the only cable provider. More than two weeks after high winds caused the coax line to pull free from my house, it's still laying in my driveway. Three days ago I called to check the status on my then ten day old service request. They had no record of it, even though I spent 20-25 minutes on the phone confirming my account details and physical address. So, they set up a new request and promised it would be resolved within 72 hours. Guess what? 72 hours have passed and still no sign of a technician and no contact from them whatsoever.
I had Comcast several years ago and they were awful then, but unless I go the satellite + DSL route, I have no other option besides OTA, which is looking very attractive right about now.
Bottom line: Comcast treats their existing customers as if they're not appreciated.
Emphathy for whom in relation to what? I don't feel empathy for the service. The service has no feelings. I'm not making it sad when I cancel for non-performance.
Learn to love Alaska
You're lucky. I have to use dial-up modem on crappy copper phone lines. It only goes about 3 KB/sec even on 56k modems (only connects at 28800). :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I lived with broken DSL for 3 months before I sent a letter to the FCC complaining. I copied the line owner and the service provider, and the problem was fixed within 48 hours of me sending the letter, probably before the FCC even received my complaint. And yes, the FCC did follow up on my complaint.
Learn to love Alaska
This is kind of situational. Overall, I would agree with what you say, but there are some limits. For example, say I have a subscription to a business. It has always had great service and customer service, and I've been with them for years. Then their data center or whatever gets hit by an earthquake, but they assure me they will be back up soon. You feel I should cut my subscription and go with a random other business I've never used, just because my preferred company is offline briefly?
Empathy is something reserved for tragic and unfortunate circumstances completely outside the control of the person.
If a person get's t-boned at an intersection and loses his leg I feel very empathetic towards them. If a person is doing 180km/h in a school zone, highsides his bike and then loses his leg, little empathy for me, I can only hope that he never gets on the road to spare others from his stupidity.
If a person loses his house in a fire and gets screwed over by the insurance company, I feel empathetic. If a person ends up on the news saying "oh we only moved 6 months ago and didn't have time to sort out insurance", little empathy from me. It could have been avoided with a 10 minute phone call, and where I live he had a 1 month grace period to arrange that.
This also applies to businesses. You're an online service. People entrust you with their data. If your ONLY datacentre gets taken out and you can't get back online quickly then there's little empathy. If all of Amazon's datacentres suddenly exploded all at the same time then I'd be quite empathetic. It all depends on how avoidable things are. It's a business, your insurance can buy you a new datacentre. It's your job to keep your customers happy. If you've been taking their money all these years without investing in hardening your infrastructure, expect little empathy from me.
I don't use auto-renew, but get an email a month before the renewel is up.
I think they are pretty desperate to keep subscribers, I don't know anyone yet, who has been refused a discount
Of course, I do not mind kicking them to the curb if they fail to offer me one. :-)
Well, to be fair, many of the US *people* didn't give them much empathy either. It wasn't as bad as it is portrayed on TV, but it was pretty bad. And many of the people who were most abusive were in very powerful positions. Which means that the actualy suffering was considerably WORSE than is shown on TV.
OTOH, there are currently more AmerInds living than existed when Columbus "discovred" the place. (And I'm not counting the ones who have been thoroughly assimilated.) But their cultures have been largely destroyed.
It is interesting to speculate how things would have worked out if the "French and Indian War" hadn't encouraged the white settlers to think of the indians as "savage brutes". (The French taught scalping to the indians at that time.) But it's also clear that large numbers of settlers weren't willing to grant any rights to other humans when they weren't forced to. Fraud and deceit was used against the Indians ever since Henry Hudson "bought" Manhattan island. (Rumor says he bought it from a tribe that didn't live there. Other rumor says that they thought of it more as a long-term lease. And a few claim that the indians felt they got a fair price. No particants are available to testify.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They can cooky coat it all they want so long as I'm not being lied to, cheated, and so forth.
A good example of a company I'd never do business with is Comcast. The company outright lies constantly. They advertise speeds and don't deliver. They make it out to appear your getting speeds several magnitudes greater than DSL. However it isn't true. DSL advertises 10mbps and if the lines are capable of it you'll actually get it. Not just at off-hours either. Comcast slows down at prime time when MOST people area actually on. Now- there are some cheap ass DSL providers too which have been supplying insufficient bandwidth from the CO although the difference here is one is capable from a technological perspective of providing the advertised speeds and the other just isn't. Comcast would have to stop advertising itself as faster than DSL for me to even consider switching.
Then they outright lie about cost increases. When my parents were forced to move from less than basic analog cable to digital they put me through a nightmare of giving us boxes, forcing us to rewire the place, and then taking them all back! Yea- that is right. They mucked up and said we needed the boxes but in actually it was basic cable subscribers who needed them and the less than basic subscribers didn't. At least not for another 5 months. 5 months later they repeat and we go through the same thing all over again. Ultimately they are charging something like $5 per box and my parents have 5 TVs. They were paying $14 USD. Now if they want to have less than the same service (they lost channels too in the switch to digital) they had to rent 2 boxes at $5 a piece. So there was a significant increase in price from $14 to $24. The representatives REFUSED to acknowledge a price increase.
Now I purchased something from a company which is doing a lot to improve support for free software. The company is little even if it is one of the larger companies focused on the GNU/Linux market. The company mucked up TWICE in sending me a product I had ordered. Any other company and I'd have ordered elsewhere after I got the wrong item twice. However I was kept well informed and given options. After the 2nd much up they told me exactly what they believed happened. They thought it was a new employee (which it was partly). The new employee sent out the wrong wireless card without the antennas. However it turned out that the only mistake the new guy actually made was mising the antennas. The 2nd time it was realized that the stock was incorrectly labeled. They got the antennas + card right but it wasn't the right card still due to the wrong labeling. Ultimately I asked for a different product so that it wouldn't happen a third time and/or I wouldn't have to wait from them to ship the right item from a different distribution center. I got two items I can't use- but I wasn't asked to send them back AND they sent me a more exspensive wifi adapter when I asked for a different product without any charge. Plus I was told not to send the cards back that wrere sent in error because it was there fault and I shouldn't have to pay for there mistake. Now that is how you do business! Plus I give them credit because there doing so much with so litte (in terms of people and money and pushing free software development forward AND contributing all at the same time in various ways).
Five minuets is long enough.
I have Comcast, and they're too cheap to use [proper materials for the climate]. They have a government-granted monopoly in the city where I live so I can't replace them.
When you reported Comcast's failure to use proper materials to the local government, what reply did you get?
I signed up with a virtual private server vendor, who had a super-good price on a Xen-based Debian server. I noted that they had what seemed to be a fairly good SLA (99.9% uptime). I signed up originally on month-to-month to see how they performed, and was pleasantly surprised, so I then switched to semi-annual on the Xen server. I needed another node for another project, and determined that one of their OpenVZ slices would do the job at a lower price. A few weeks after signing up for the OpenVZ slice, I was notified about a maintainance window coming up on the host that my OpenVZ slice was running on. The window was listed as approx 45 min to do some a/c power shuffling around at the datacenter.. All well and good. The maintainance window came and went, no vps...Nothing from trying to boot the server from the SolusVM console. So, I put a ticket in, got told that the node my vps was on had problems and was not coming back up. Ok so far.. They're gonna bust their SLA on this one.. I replied back on the ticket to see if they had ANY estimate of recovery.. Silence.. Next morning.. still silence, still no vps.. That afternoon.. still silence, still no vps.. Finally I hit their facebook page and finally got some satisfaction.. Finally after over 24 hours, the vps came back up... Wondering what compensation they'd give for an over 24-hour outage, I put a ticket in asking that very thing.. No reply for several days.. Finally I decided to call them.. Come to find out, they claimed, since this was a maintainance window, there was no SLA compensation due... Huh??? The window was 45 min.. the server was down over 24 hours.. After a semi-nice but firm email reply to them on my original ticket, they opted to provide a "courtesy credit" of 1/2 month.. Not gonna name the vendor because *other* than this issue, they've been great..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Streaming isn't a primary business for funimation, they make money off of dvd/bluray sales. I think it more likely that they both aren't dedicating many resources to the service, and that they really aren't particularly competent. That's speaking as someone that buys a fair number of their disks and regrets it sometimes when they make some boneheaded and/or lazy decision there.
Every web page from Funimation.com is loaded with ads. If you use adBlock+, their videos will not play.
It is unacceptable for a site that you pay for to force ads on you as well. So I cancelled them and I won't renew, ever.
It's a cartoon channel. You expect a SLA for that?
However, they are unusually clueless. www.funimation.com is nothing like valid HTML. It's an obfuscated Javascript file with a starter bit of Javascript to execute it. But it doesn't work because the character coding is wrong. I'm not sure whether their site has been hacked, or whether their site is a hack.
This year Netflix was down 30 hrs and Time Warner had a 39 hour outtage. That seems about right to burn their offices down and kill them all.
... the Roku channel in question is most certainly not termed as "beta" in any shape or form. Neither is their Android app (can't say about the Apple one, no Apple product here).
I do see the same problems... anytime after 6pm of a weekday evening the Roku app is slow to load, and does crash my Roku (yes, it's a N1000 but it still gives good service for a device that initially came out just for Netflix). The Android app at least is more stable but its interface is quirky and requires some figuring out.
Funimation on Roku - best usability but worst reliability.
Funimation on Android - worst usability, best reliability.
Funimation on website - balanced between the two.
IMO the Funimation Channel should be taken "private" on Roku until a reliable service is in place. When it works right, then customer satisfaction will be better. But with competitors like Crunchyroll coming along, who knows?
But then I think Funimations' main business is to distribute the shows and to dub (re-version) into English, and make sales on DVD distributions, which is their chief source of income apparently. Obviously streaming isn't their #1 priority. IMO Funimation should get in contact with Amazon and work something out, as Netflix uses Amazon's service to do video distribution.
Verizon's customer service has been completely worthless. You cannot even speak with a tier-2 technician, and the tier-1 phone monkeys are not allowed to access any useful corporate information.
Just like (GTE) DSL and ISDN before it, Verizon FiOS was an excellent product when it was first introduced. Things began to go downhill a few years later when the product support was transitioned away from the "Advanced Products Group" to the regular phone monkeys. I've had it for five years and it's been good, but I'm now ready to pull the plug.
-- This space for rent.
...it appears to be free on Roku, so you're getting what you paid for. Move along or wait for it to come back, your choice.
You do seem to be confusing "sympathy", a feeling sorrow at another's discomfort, with "empathy" a sharing of similar feelings of any kind. It would seem to be very easy to feel "empathetic" about someone who's been careless or risked their customer's services on good luck with datacenters, without feeling any sympathy towards for their carelessness.
Also be aware that many small ISP's operate on a shoestring: Their features may be something important, such as refusing to store or sell client data to spammers and properly encrypting their client data to prevent abusive Patriot Act searches. I know a small ISP co-location site that does precisely this, and they had some very disruptive downtime when faced with a subpoena that they could not serve: the lawyers, and the judge, took quite a long time to understand that they were deliberately careful *not* to store the kinds of data the subpoena was for, and to accept that the ISP could not and would not just change overnight.
I mean, you have to manually add it - it's not in the channel shop, or at least it wasn't last time I checked.
That being said, if you are paying for a service, whether in beta or not, the company needs to be on top of it. If the service doesn't work - or doesn't work properly during certain times, the company should give users at least a partial credit if they can't get the service restored in a couple of days.
I am actually really sad to hear about this - I installed the Funimation channel a couple of months ago, really enjoyed it, and was looking at subscribing this coming week. Only reason I am not a subscriber already is because I've been crazy-busy since mid-December, and have been working the past two weeks on getting caughtup on the backlog on the DVR (should be finishing that this week, which is why I was finally looking at subscribing to Funimation). However, after hearing this news, I guess I will put off subscribing until they can fix the issues.
OK, there are exceptions. I had a Breville appliance stop working and they were great. But that's really, really rare. On my list of companies that really suck: Google. Whether using a paid or unpaid service, it can be nearly impossible to find any way to contact anything resembling support, and in my experience Android bug reports go ignored more or less forever.
Three Squirrels
So there's no people working in the businesses on your planet, sir?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Also be aware that many small ISP's operate on a shoestring
Then they should be providing a service at the right cost. I have no problem with my host being down for a few weeks. I pay on the lower scale of double dollars a year for hosting. They also provide no guarantees.
If on the other hand your advertising campaign is based around uptime, availability, redundancy etc then don't be surprised if you lose a few customers when you're down for even a day.
I do the same thing with insurance companies.
Always ask if there's an underwriter in the building. There never is, there will be giggles, they will put you on hold while they grab a coffee from the machine, they will offer a lower price on their return 'from talking to the underwriter'.
It's a game. You have to play. There's no risk of losing.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Welp, if the service is down for three weeks, something must have happened to the sysad. COnsidering you probably don't have a job due to the banksters stealing all the money and corrupt governments protecting the theft, your best bet is to APPLY for a JOB as SYSAD, and fix YOUR OWN Services.
I give ya a 50/50 chance of getting hired. They probably have old outdated software, no backup, no firewall, and a bunch of rootkits installed allowing exim to transfer all the spam to the local accounts. Perhaps the first command on the loaded down box should be killall -9 exim, then rename the exim binary. That will take care of your spam problem, but then you have a bunch of rootkits and accounts/home dir's to backup, and cleanup. kill off all the high CPU processes, backup, format, install, copy accounts back boom, your fired.