August 26, 2016
Recently, we had some trouble with the cloud services from Google one of our primary cloud vendors. In response, I wrote this very strongly worded blog post on my personal blog. Then we tweeted. Within four hours, Google had restored our services, and within a few hours of that, we were able to run down the problem with one of our servers that had been problematic for Google.
A long story short: they had good reasons for shutting that server down, but their communication left much to be desired.Frankly, we did not expect the uproar we got from the web. Our tweets spread like wildfire across the globe and got a lot of attention. We definitely wanted some attention, from the Google product team... which we got. But we got a lot more than that, there were several articles published about us:
We did our best to give Google credit where it was due, and they were extremely generous with us, once we got their attention. But we also felt like it was way to difficult to get their attention.
Both the Google team and the CareSet team have nearly completed our post-mortum on what happened here, and since we decided to go public with our criticisms of Google's services, we own it to them to be transparent about the technical mistakes that we made. And as data journalists we are fundamentally committed to organizational transparency in any case.
You can look out for more specific information on this blog, and we will update this article with a link as appropriate.I am happy to say that our Google cloud services are again running swimmingly.-FT
