SaaS Outage
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has become a pretty standard model for application delivery in both business and consumer markets. While it is nice that you do not have to download and install software on your local machine, it is a PITA when it is not working. This morning I tried to file my tax return for 2008 on one of the most popular tax preparation website -TaxAct, I was told the service is “temporarily offline”. I understand it is getting closer to Apr 15th, and people are rushing to the tax preparation sites to file their tax. Still a bummer when you can do nothing other than waiting the service to be back, which is completely not under your control.
This reminds me of another story. A company provided SaaS solutions to business clients. It happened every Friday that production servers had some sort of outage because they could not handle the surging load. Needless to say, customers were pissed-off because they were paying big bucks for the qualify of service.
