Sorry, My Alarm Did Not Wake Me

If This Then That, IFTTT.com, is a service letting you connect almost anything to anything else. If it is raining – text me. If a blog post is published then email it to me and so on. Well, the backend services running IFTTT failed last night and the monitoring system failed as well. Double whammy.

The CEO was nice enough to email me and all of the users today and stated they had a failure.

Last night at approximately 10:00pm PST much of the work IFTTT does in the background stopped due to an issue with one of our backend services. Our monitoring systems would have alerted us to the problem immediately, but those unfortunately failed as well and we weren’t able to fix the issue until this morning at 10:00am PST.

Any affected Recipes should pick up right where they left off last night.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We know that many of you have come to depend on IFTTT in your everyday lives and we take great pride in that. A stoppage of work for this duration is unacceptable and we will do whatever it takes to ensure we get in front of these issues much faster in the future.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

No big issue you say? Chances are someone holding your money, debt, name, password, etc. went down yesterday as well but you don’t know it. Applications change faster than the pants we wear so we need systems to alert when something fails. When the alarm fails we need an alarm for the alarm.

Use this as an example to emphasize to your teams that these failures happen all of the time. If they say no big deal, then search around for other failures that cost real money like the one Screwfix suffered on Friday.

This post originally appeared on servicevirtualization.com.