Downtime for a global service? Tell me when in UTC!

If a service with an allegedly global audience, say one run by Yahoo or by Google has some scheduled downtime, they always give the time when it will be back, or the time when it went down, in PST. Now I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t give a flying fig about when the downtime began on the other side of the entire planet. What I do care about is what that means to me as a user. I want to know when it went down for my timezone, and when it’s going to be back. It’s not as if there aren’t services which do exactly this and it’s not as if it’s beyond the scope of global behemoth-like IT businesses to do this themselves, but it what it gives everyone outside of the US is short shrift and two fingers up.

Making a blog post about your downtime isn’t enough. Giving out useful information is. As it is, thanks a lot, for not helping anyone out except yourselves.

It’s good to know I’m not the only moaner who finds this annoying

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One thought on “Downtime for a global service? Tell me when in UTC!”

  1. It’s ridiculous. UTC would be far better – it’s what the bloody servers are running at in the first place. And when you’ve got countries around the world that span multiple timezones, that AREN’T America, like Australia for example, you end up with a really nasty sliding scale of timezone offsets. East US to West Australia would be about 13 hours, West US to East Australia about 19 hours.

    Just bite the bullet, use a standard and let the n00bs figure out for themselves what it all means.

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