[FRC BLOG] The Great Registration System Crash of 2016

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Billfred

To split hairs, the abort message hit their Twitter account at 12:45 PM Manchester time. I imagine they were making efforts to get things back up before realizing how borked everything was.

Having been in situations like this before (in a professional capacity), I can tell you that a 45 minute response time isn't actually that bad. Even if you have everyone needed to analyse the problem standing by, it does take some amount of time to pull the logs, find something relevant in them, and figure out what's going on, or even to figure out if it's a 5 minute or 5 hour fix. Add on top of that having to communicate the details and expectations from the engineers to management, get a decision, and get the communication out.

And then you have to ask what FIRST would consider acceptable. Sure, they want everything to go smoothly, but if there is a hiccup is starting registration 5 or 10 minutes late acceptable? Where do they decide to draw the line? It's all good to sit back as an armchair quarterback and say that 5 minutes is too late, but that really doesn't take into account the realities of business. This isn't life or death, waiting a few minutes, or even an hour, isn't going to be the end of the world.