Technology is Hard

Amazon, the leading Cloud provider had some major issues today. The screen shot on the right shows their status page around 1PM today – and RED is not good. Even USA Today, and CNN reported the 4-5 hour outage this afternoon:

“People reported outages and delays on services like Slack, Trello, Sprinklr, Venmo and even Down Detector”

This is the last day of the month – a day in the race industry is usually pretty big because a number of races have price increases. About 25,000 people signed up for races today and RunSignup processed over $1 Million in transactions. If we had been down like many other sites it would have been a very bad day for us and our customers.

The reality is that no technology is perfect – even a huge company like Amazon goes down. And while we may have had a perfect track record last year, I am quite sure we will have problems at some point in the future.

BUT, we do spend a lot of time and money and talent trying to figure out how to make our platform reliable and redundant and available. Some of that expertise and investment paid off today for us and our customers. It won’t always be perfect, but our investments in technology are meaningful. And we take a great deal of pride in them and our amazing development team.