Western Digital 'MyCloud' Is Down 5 Days and Counting

Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "A friend of mine bought a Western Digital 'MyCloud' NAS server (non-RAID) a couple of weeks ago. WD implements the cloud service through its wd2go.com site. He reports that that site is down and has been since last Wednesday. No word on when it'll be back up. The only official announcements are daily repeats of this canned posting: 'Our My Cloud and My Book Live users are experiencing intermittent issues with WD servers that enable remote access when using these products. These issues include poor transfer speeds and/or inability to connect remotely. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience and will provide updates as they are available.'"

Comments

When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[nyctopterus]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[RabidReindeer]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

Banking and computers go almost all the way back to the beginning. Probably only the military, scientific and insurance industries can claim as much. As a result, there are a multitude of banking software packages and service vendors with long histories to choose from.

But just as there are banks that aren't competent with their investments, there are banks which are incompetent with their IT.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[FireFury03]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.

However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.

I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.

WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[AmiMoJo]

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

On the other hand maybe they discovered a serious security issue and did the responsible thing while properly fixing it. A lot of banks just seem to ignore security issues.