[...]Tell your IT problems in time « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog[...]…

The worldwide outage of the Windows Azure Service Management technology began at 1:45am GMT on Wednesday 5:45pm PT Thursday)

Windows Azure Service Management lets customers manage their deployments, hosted services and storage accounts on the cloud platform-as-a-service.

One ZDNet UK reader called in to give some details on how the Azure problems affected their business.

“Our live site’s been down all day now, so we’ve been losing money. The address it’s on is not resolving, you can’t even ping it,” Ashley Rudland, who runs a startup travel site hosted on Azure named worldcitycard.com, told ZDNet UK.

Update 7:50pm GMT/11am PT

Faults spread across Azure as Microsoft tries to restore service

Failures are propagating across the Azure cloud in America and Northern Europe as Microsoft tries to get its cloud online.

Microsoft is keeping quiet on the entire thing. “There will not be any briefings around this issue,” one of Microsoft’s PR companies informed ZDNet UK on Wednesday afternoon.

Windows Azure Service Disruption Update
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/03/01/windows-azure-service-disruption-update.aspx

I lead the engineering organization responsible for the Windows Azure service and I want to update you on the service disruption we had over the past day.

Yesterday, February 28th, 2012 at 5:45 PM PST Windows Azure operations became aware of an issue impacting the compute service in a number of regions. The issue was quickly triaged and it was determined to be caused by a software bug. While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year.

External forces who work on the customer’s data center or supply equipment to it, including manufacturers, vendors, factory representatives, installers, integrators, and other third parties were responsible for 50% to 60% of abnormal incidents reported in a data center, according to Uptime Institute

But when an abnormal incident leads to a major outage that causes a data center failure, internal staff gets the majority of blame. ‘It’s the design, manufacturing, installation processes that leave banana peels behind and the operators who slip and fall on them,’

Who do you blame when IT breaks?
Assessing fault in data center incidents may pit internal IT staff against their vendors
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224650/Who_do_you_blame_when_IT_breaks_

There’s always a reason why things break in IT, and the powers-that-be can usually find someone to blame — be it a data center operations staff member, an OEM, a systems integrator or a third party service provider.

An offender often leaves clear fingerprints showing that a component was mislabeled or a process wasn’t updated. In other cases, an incident may be the result of oversights by multiple parties.

But with the possible exception of a meteor strike, there’s always someone to blame for a data center problem.

The majority are blamed on outside parties such as contractors or vendors, with a sizeable percentage of fault assigned to data center operations staff, according to data compiled by the Uptime Institute.

Tieto refuses to tell: the authority does not know who was affected by the accident

The Swedish authorities are suffering a major difficulty in accessing detailed information on Tieto in the country late last year it happened to crash.

Data difficulties began in Sweden in late November, when the disk array broke down in server room. Faults affected the company’s approximately 50 customers, and how to overcome them lasted for weeks.

The group considered a number of times in a declaration of disaster for society as a critical. The decision, however, never been made.

Still, the Agency are to this day do not know exactly who the authorities all the information, the accident.

WHOEVER suggested that all publicity is good publicity clearly never envisioned the wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year, laying waste to some of the most meticulously tailored reputations on earth.

Which raises a question: Are some crises so dire that public relations victory is simply not on the menu? And, if so, what’s an embattled company to do?

Putting aside the limitations of crisis management, those in the trade generally share a sense that the companies at the center of recent events committed grievous errors. At the top of the list is BP.

“It was one of the worst P.R. approaches that I’ve seen in my 56 years of business,” says Mr. Rubenstein. “They tried to be opaque. They had every excuse in the book. Right away they should have accepted responsibility and recognized what a disaster they faced. They basically thought they could spin their way out of catastrophe. It doesn’t work that way.”

Children stuck on scary roller coasters sometimes close their eyes and wait for the ride to end. So, apparently, do grown-ups heading giant corporations in crisis.

Poll: Is it really Legal vs. PR in a crisis?
http://www.jamesjdonnelly.com/2010/08/poll-is-it-really-legal-vs-pr-in-a-crisis/

“Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,” says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum, who — like many practitioners contacted for this article — required elaborate promises that he would not be portrayed as speaking about any particular company. “There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.”

The New York Times on crisis strategy: the conflict between lawyers and communicators.
http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/08/new-york-times-on-crisis-comms/

A recurrent theme in the Times story is conflict between lawyers and communication strategists

How can attorneys and communicators best work together in these scenarios? If this conflict is built-in from the start, rather than one side ‘winning’ against the other

Did Tieto save in the wrong place?

Tieto corporation has just some time ago an IT accident was the largest in the history of Sweden.

The company’s difficulties began in late November, when the disk array in server room had some serious problems. Faults affected the company’s approximately 50 customers, and how to overcome them lasted for weeks.

Computer Sweden has received advance information in the coming weeks published survey by the Swedish authorities.

The most serious accusations on suspicions that Tieto may have to use “cost-saving technology,” which may have caused or aggravated by the accident. (saving at the wrong place)

The authorities will be informed about the accident as a result, at least to present will be more rigorous and more specific requirements for services, the degree of confidence. The price will instead prioritize the less.

“The fact that the information your report comes three months after the event, it is not acceptable”