Cynic Root

The Web is Falling (Or whales are falling out of the sky)

Twitter got a huge boost in terms of exposure and users by throwing whales at innocent users (http://cynicroot.com/blog/2008/07/30/the-twitter-conspiracy-downtime-a-publicity-stunt/).

Other companies are now doing the same. It seems that some downtime provides good exposure to companies with many users which don’t get too much spotlight.

The best example is probably Amazon S3/EC2. There are a lot of well known web services using Amazon’s clouds, BUT you don’t hear about it UNTIL Amazon’s cloud goes offline. Then you discover that all of your favorite services are down. And you blog about it. And you read about it. And if you haven’t heard that Amazon is powering half the internet, now you know it. And despite the relatively small downtimes, you will use it.

And if you didn’t know that already, you now know that virtually everyone is using gmail (even if on a separate domain) thanks to the face that gmail was down. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rammikins/2755076836/)

Facebook’s website practically going down for a day when facebook made changes to profiles didn’t have the same effect. Everybody already knows facebook. The new profile might have an interesting effect, especially if many people DON’T like it.

Seems to me that this is a good strategy if you are a successful infrastructure company that doesn’t get enough coverage.

Your votes: which infrastructure service is next.