As a current (and reasonably long time) customer of SAS Exchange hosting provider Intermedia.com, we at OleOle were naturally affected to some extent by Intermedia’s extended system outage on March 5th, 2010. For pretty much the entire morning on that day, we, along with thousands of their other customers, had zero email capability, no sending, no receiving, zilch.
To make matters worse, during a large part of this outage, Intermedia’s own website was unavailable, so affected customers could not even go onto the Intermedia website to check for status updates or open support tickets. Needless to say, their PBX was being bombarded by thousands of irate customers as well, so getting someone on the line for an update wasn’t that easy either. Twitter ended up being the best source of updates, first from other customers who tweeted what info they could glean, and then later from Intermedia’s own Twitter account when they managed to get more caught up and started giving out some official updates.