Global Quality Journal

New York AT&T iPhone Shutdown: Is Quality of Service The Real Reason?

BusinessWeek:

An AT&T Mystery: Abrupt New York iPhone Shutdown

A halt in iPhone sales around New York on AT&T's Web site stirs fresh concern that its network is too frail to support U.S. urban smartphone traffic

By Arik Hesseldahl

A brief halt in online sales of the Apple iPhone in the New York area kept alive concerns that AT&T's network isn't up to the task of handling smartphone traffic in some of the largest U.S. cities.

Customers who shopped for an iPhone on AT&T's Web site and gave ZIP codes for areas in and around New York City were told that the device was unavailable during a period starting on Dec. 27 and lasting until the afternoon of the following day. Sales of the iPhone through AT&T (T) and Apple (AAPL) retail stores in the New York area, as well as via Apple's Web site, were unaffected.

AT&T offered little explanation for the halt in sales, and Apple kept mum on the subject. "We periodically modify our promotions and distribution channels," AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook said in a message sent via e-mail. Some analysts speculated that the change, however short-lived, was further confirmation that AT&T's equipment is too flimsy to handle the heavy data use typically associated with the iPhone. "Clearly AT&T is struggling with quality-of-service concerns," says Rich Doherty, head of the Envisioneering Group, a research firm. "It's the first time I'm aware of this happening with any wireless product." Apple representatives didn't return repeated requests for comment. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

Outage Brings Dark Clouds to Florida's Bright House

WFTV.com News 

Bright House Not Taking Blame For Outage

Posted: 6:11 am EST December 28, 2009Updated: 6:52 pm EST December 28, 2009

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Bright House Networks said a huge Internet outage has been fixed and is not taking the blame.After a weekend of frustrated backlash by customers, Bright House Networks released a statement Monday saying Internet connection problems were not their fault.A company spokesperson, Brian Craven, wrote:"Customer credits will not be given because at no time was Internet service down. The issue was caused by a hardware problem experienced by a Bright House Networks vendor."Some customers were so frustrated, they walked through the doors of the Bright House office to return their boxes and give up on the company’s Internet and cable. “There were a lot of people inside with their boxes, returning them and everything,” customer Junior Rodriguez said.For the Rodriquez family, the weekend problems were the last straw.“The boxes never worked and each week we had to call someone to help us at the house,” he said."I'm just surprised that the people who knew there was a problem didn't get the word down,” customer Lorraine Armstrong said.Other customers wondered why it took days to resolve a problem that they were told was caused by equipment in customers' homes.“I thought at first being Christmas day, I thought it was people Googling the terrorist thing in Detroit. So I didn't think a whole lot of it,” she said.It turns out that assumption was almost correct. Bright House says their unnamed vendor was overloaded by holiday weekend web traffic. But the confusion may have cost the cable company customers. [More]

Great example of how NOT to talk to your customers.

posted by: gqpartner

DDoS Attack at The DNS Provider Two Days Before Christmas

CNET:

(CNET) -- An attack directed at the DNS provider for some of the Internet's larger e-commerce companies -- including Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Expedia -- took several Internet shopping sites offline Wednesday evening, two days before Christmas.

Neustar, the company that provides DNS services under the UltraDNS brand name, confirmed an attack took place Wednesday afternoon, taking out sites or rendering them extremely sluggish for about an hour. A representative who answered the customer support line said the attacks were directed against Neustar facilities in Palo Alto and San Jose, California, and Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications for Neustar, confirmed that at about 4:45 p.m. PST, "our alarms went off."

Goldberg said the company received a disproportionately high number of queries coming into the system, and analyzed it as an attack. Neustar deployed "a mitigation response" within minutes of the attack, he said, and brought matters under control within an hour. The response limited the problems to Northern California, he said.

In addition to the high-profile sites, dozens of smaller sites that rely upon Amazon for Web-hosting services were also taken down by the attack. Amazon's S3 and EC2 services were affected by the problems, according to Jeff Barr, Amazon's lead Web Evangelist, who retweeted a report to that effect without clarification and confirmed it in later tweets.

For a brief period Wednesday evening, "ultradns" was the top search term on Google, likely as frantic technicians at Web sites attempted to figure out what was going on with their sites. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

Worldwide Cost of IT Failure: $6.2 Trillion

ZDnet (via The Open Road) :

Worldwide cost of IT failure: $6.2 trillion

Posted by Michael Krigsman:

Most IT professionals know that project failure is a common and serious problem in organizations of all kinds. New research attempts to quantify the extent of IT failure in the worldwide economy.

Most IT failure research seeks to determine the percentage of projects that run over-budget, are late, or do not deliver expected results. While those numbers are important, they do not convey a concrete sense of the overall cost impact created by failed IT.

To address this issue, Roger Sessions, a noted author and expert on complexity, developed a model for calculating the total global cost of IT failure. Roger describes his approach in a white paper titled, The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. He concludes that IT failure costs the global economy a staggering $6.2 trillion per year. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

BlackBerry Outage, Again; Reputation at Risk

As we said in the preceding post -- reputation does matter.

SFGate.com:

BlackBerry users beset by second outage in a week

By ROB GILLIES, Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

(12-23) 08:37 PST TORONTO, Canada (AP) --

The second outage of BlackBerry service in less than a week frustrated people who depend on the messaging device and comes at a bad time for its maker, which faces increasing competition in the market it helped pioneer.

BlackBerry subscribers often are so reliant on the devices that they peck at their keyboards all day and keep them on their night stands while they sleep. When e-mail and Web service on the devices went out Tuesday night, Twitter and other online forums were peppered with complaints.

BlackBerry service was restored Wednesday morning, and the company behind the service, Canada's Research in Motion Ltd., blamed a software upgrade for the problem. The glitch, which comes after another outage last Thursday, could damage the company's reputation.

"One of RIM's big advantages is that it's perceived as a reliable device," said Duncan Stewart, director of research and analysis at DSam Consulting. "To lose the advantage of reliability would in fact be a very big deal for this company."

Herbert Sexton, 34, said his BlackBerry service has been spotty all week where he lives near Atlanta. One day no messages come in at all and the next, 130 e-mails flood his inbox. Messages he's already replied to pop up again. He said the disruption could push him to a different phone.

"I like to have something constant," he said. "If service keeps going out, you never know what to expect." [More]

posted by: gqpartner

What IT could Learn from Tiger Woods Or Reputational Risk of Service Outages

Let's say you associate your brand with a high-profile celebrity spokesman. Then something bad happens to the reputation of your promoter. Your brand reputation might take a hit. To cover this damage insurers are coming with a reputational risk products. Call it Tiger Woods safety net.

BNet:

Insuring an Image: What if Woods Can't Deliver the Goods?
By Ed Leefeldt | Dec 17, 2009

A good definition of an insurer is one who profits from the misfortune of others. That’s been true since the days when ships lost their cargo to pirates in the 1600s. And it’s just as true today when corporations lose millions because celebrity endorsers are caught in the act. But remember: An insurer is always there to share your pain - for a price.
The Washington Post reports that a New York brokerage firm is developing a new type of insurance policy to “protect companies against endorsers gone wild,” a la Tiger Woods.
DeWitt Stern Group says it will begin selling “reputational risk” insurance next year to pay policyholders for the loss of sales, ad expenses and endorser fees caused by a public relations crisis, such as Woods’ “philandering.”
Unfortunately too little too late for Nike, Gillette and Gatorade, as well as Accenture, which used Le Tigre in their ad campaigns. Consulting firm Accenture has already unleashed the Tiger, while the others don’t appear to be using his ads. [link]

Now, what is the lesson for these service providers? Data Center Knowledge rounded up major outages of 2009 and stresses the role of Twitter and other social media in service monitoring and customer support communication.

• Lengthy Outage at Fisher Plaza
• Michael Jackson’s Death Slows The Web
• The Sidekick Snafu
• Total Data Loss for Ma.gnolia
• Twitter Felled by DDoS
• Amazon Cloud Glitches
• Downtime at Rackspace 
• Fire at 151 Front Street
• Gmail is Down! Gmail is Down! 
• Paypal Down, and the Meter is Running
• Air New Zealand Travel ‘Chaos’

To us the lesson is simple: watch the reputation and quality of your service; the damage from an outage is much more than lost customer transactions -- it is the direct damage done to the brand. With the service failure in the background, all well spent advertising and PR dollars  start working exactly in the opposite direction. A well publicized outage is a de facto negative PR campaign run by a service provider against their own brand. Reputational risk insurance policies are yet to come to the IT market. In the meantime focus on quality can go a long way to assure an IT service provider's brand and reputation.

posted by: gqpartner

BlackBerry: E-mail Outage

WirelessWeek:

BlackBerry Users Dealing with E-mail Outage
By Rob Gillies, Associated Press Writer Thursday, December 17, 2009
TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry users in North America faced delays in receiving e-mail on their devices Thursday.
The company that makes the popular messaging phones, Research In Motion Ltd., said technicians were working on the problem. The company said users could still make phone calls, browse the Internet and send and receive text messages. RIM didn't immediately say how many users were affected.RIM's system is relatively reliable, but its centralized structure means that any problems can affect millions of users.In February 2008, an upgrade to the wireless system apparently caused a three-hour service disruption. In April 2008, a minor software upgrade crashed the system. A smaller disruption in September 2008 also was caused by a software glitch. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

Rackspace Cloud Computing Outage on Dec.18

Cloud Computing Journal:

According to an Apparent Networks Performance Advisory issued today, cloud services provider Rackspace experienced a connectivity loss at its Dallas-Fort Worth data center on Dec. 18, 2009.

Access to business services at that data center was not possible during the outage, which began at approximately 4:37 p.m. eastern time and lasted about 35 minutes. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

Was Citibank Robbed by Russian Cyber-gang?

CNet:

December 22, 2009 9:40 AM PST
Report: FBI investigating Citibank cyberattack
by Lance Whitney

Citigroup denies it, but its Citibank unit was reportedly robbed of tens of millions of dollars, the victim of a cyberattack by members of a Russian criminal gang, says Tuesday's Wall Steet Journal (subscription required).
The attack was discovered this past summer, says the Journal, but investigators for the FBI and National Security Agency believe it could have happened months or a year prior. The two agencies have reportedly shared information with the Department of Homeland Security and Citigroup to defend against the attack. The investigation is supposedly ongoing, with no word on whether or not any of the stolen money has been found.
Investigators initially became suspicious after spotting traffic coming from IP addresses once used by the Russian Business Network, a Russian gang of cybercriminals who went off the radar back in 2007, notes the Journal. But reports have surfaced that members of the gang have since regrouped to launch a wave of new attacks. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

Vive La Mozilla! (It is More Secure)

www.theage.com.au via The Open Road blog:

French army sides with Mozilla in email war

December 11, 2009

A new email client unveiled by Mozilla this week contains code from an unusual source -- the French military, which decided the open source product was more secure than Microsoft's rival Outlook.

The story of how the French government became involved with the open source movement, which has transformed much software around the world from proprietary to free, goes back six years. [More]

posted by: gqpartner