To Err is... Pretty Common

When a website displays an error message, don’t freak out! Because the truth is, website glitches and hiccups are simply a fact of life. There are so many things that can put a site down, so the best expectation to have is that your site is going to take a dive from time to time.

Remember that at the end of the day, you are dealing with computers. And computers have bugs, hardware and software failures, network communication failures, “too many damn people on your site that your server can’t handle the concurrent connections” failures, and “a programmer blinked while programming and forgot an underscore in a line of code” failures. Point is, as much as you’d like to think technology is a black and white world, it’s definitely a gray world (with lots of shades of gray). The sooner you come to accept that, the less stressed out you’ll be.

In one day last week, I visited YouTube, Digg and Twitter….and received error messages from all three of them. I think it’s safe to say that these companies know technology, no? And these companies are spending a good amount of money on servers and technological support, no? And these companies have teams of nerds staring at their respective sites all day, no?

Even Google understands the reality of this sticky Internet thing. Google launched Gmail in 2004. They just took off the beta* tag last week! Last week!! This is Google we’re talking about, and it took them more than FOUR years to be psyched and confident enough about their product to say, hey, we’re down with this Gmail thing, let’s get crazy (now that it’s 100% developed and ready) and remove that beta tag.  Their new browser Chrome throws a code every now and then, too.

Website errors have become so common that Flickr now has a “Fatal Web Error” support group, where people can post screenshots of problems they’ve had with the website, and web developers can get customer feedback about error messages. But this unique Flickr group doesn’t claim to be solving the problem. They are just allowing people to “explore how to make website errors a more pleasant and useful experience.” The creators of this group understand that website errors are as inevitable as traffic in your morning commute. They are a complication that must be dealt with optimistically and constructively. Flickr is so down with being down that their witty error message reads, “Flickr is having a massage.” Well I’ll tell you right now, when a site goes down, none of those programmers are getting massages, unless a foot up an ass is the kind of massage they’re into. They are just saying, “People, CHILL OUT! It’s a website after all…and it will be up real soon, so be cool.”

We’re saying it may be more helpful to get a better understanding of technology and its shortcomings before you give it such a hard time. OR give your web team such a hard time because hey, we’re, I mean, THEY are working hard for you.

*Regarding “beta,” generally, computer software goes through two stages of release testing. Alpha is in house testing, by the developers and QA specialists. Beta is next, once the developer *thinks* it’s ready to go. Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky and/or trusted customers. They ALWAYS figure out a way to break it. Every. Damn. Time. From there, the developer continues developing until it’s 99.999% perfect, and the Beta tag is ditched. Then they take off the pocket protectors and party hard.