Pssst! Pass it on!

I wrote this piece on antisocial motorcycle riding after finding a particularly compelling Australian public service announcement on YouTube. This could have just as easily been posted here, so I thought I’d share. Please share it with your fellow riders.

Facebook teaches us how destroy trust and alienate customers

A while back, I wrote a rather long-winded piece on brand trust. I recently had an opportunity to reflect on that material when I couldn’t log into Facebook for an extended period of time. While I don’t spend hours and hours on the site, I do rely on it to stay connected with some people. With me, as with many users, Facebook is the sole means of contact between me and some of my peers (former coworkers, former classmates, etc.). I’m sure this is music to the ears of many Facebook executives, but my recent experience has left me feeling a little uneasy about the situation.

“One of the quickest ways to permanently destroy [users’] trust is to make [them] feel helpless: 1) deny them access to their critical data; 2) without warning or notice of why or for how long; and 3) make it impossible for them to find out.”

I should mention that I have spent about a decade in software development. I have worked on distributed systems involving millions of transactions per day for companies like Amazon.com and Yahoo! So I understand some of the complexities involved in implementing a platform like Facebook that can scale to hundreds of millions of users.

When I attempted to log into my Facebook account around noon on a Saturday, I was surprised by the message, “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

As someone who has been around large scale systems for most of my career, I know it is extremely rare that scheduled or anticipated maintenance occurs during peak hours. However, I also know that well-implemented systems temporarily forbid access to parts of an application which experience unanticipated critical failures (e.g., widespread network or power outage, widespread data corruption, etc.). I know that reliably supporting millions of transactions per day is hard. Shit happens. Nascent applications (like Facebook) are bound to run into difficulties at some point. I’m certainly not going to bash Facebook engineers if it happens on their watch (glass houses and all).

But this instance doesn’t sit well with me for a few reasons. First, the outage ended up being quite long. It wasn’t until over a day later that I was able to log in again. Second, during the entire outage I had zero information on the nature of the problem and the estimated resolution time. These alone may be tolerable, but after Googling the issue, I found out I wasn’t alone. People have been experiencing issues like this for several years. Third, there is absolutely no way to gain more visibility. Facebook does not provide a means to contact it if this problem arises. This is probably for good reason in most cases (one doesn’t want several thousand affected users calling or e-mailing every time they forget their password), but it is very frustrating if you are among those who have been locked out for several weeks. While Facebook acknowledges the issue, it requires that you log in to alert them to a prolonged lock-out.

Yes, that’s right: if you can’t log in, then you must log in to let them know you can’t log in. I’m curious how many of Facebook’s 300+ million accounts were created just to log in to complain that the primary account was unavailable....

When one places critical data into the hands of another to manage, it requires a lot of trust. Most often, this trust is built up over a long time. Little by little, through repeated use, users trust Facebook to deliver access to the social circles they have created. Some, like me, end up trusting it so much that it becomes their exclusive means. One of the quickest ways to permanently destroy that trust is to make your users feel helpless: 1) deny them access to their critical data; 2) without warning or notice of why or for how long; and 3) make it impossible for them to find out.

You can be sure I am thinking twice about finding an alternative. This will likely mean that I spend less time on Facebook in the future, which will mean less exposure to the site’s ads, which will result in fewer clicks, which will mean less in advertising revenues. Don’t get me wrong, I am not so narcissistic as to think my reduction in use alone can affect Facebook’s bottom line, but if the company isn’t careful, on aggregate users whose trust has been breached can have a real effect. This might open the door for a competitor like Google to step in. Hopefully Facebook can work out its issues before this happens.

But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion....