It’s not a relaxing weekend for the people over at crowdSPRING, a startup that since March 2008 has been offering an online environment where creative people can come to collaborate on and contribute new design ideas.
A couple of days ago, the company set out to improve the performance of both the hardware and software that powers their website. Instead, the site update knocked the website down cold, and they’ve been having trouble getting it back online ever since.
When you go to the crowdsourcing startup’s website now, you’ll be forwarded to a message hosted on subdomain apology.crowdspring.com that reads:
In an effort to improve speed and stability, we began pushing a site update this morning at 9am CST. Unfortunately, this means that we needed to bring the site offline and this process may take as long as 24 hours (although we swear to all things good and holy that we hope it takes less).
We truly, truly apologize for the inconvenience but we also truly, truly hope that you’ll find the site much more well behaved after this update. If you have a project that will be affected by this, or if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll do absolutely anything we can to help. We’ll be more than happy to extend any project affected by this outage or find other creative solutions to minimize the impact on you, so don’t hesitate to ask.
It has taken way more than 24 hours, though. The latest update posted on their Twitter account mentioned that they’ll be back in business on Sunday after getting some rest.
Downtime’s never fun, and it happens to the best of us, but posting an update that you’re tired and going to sleep before doing some final site testing is simply unprofessional.
Maybe they should have crowdsourced for some help while they were going to bed.
(Thanks for the tip, Brandon)