If you haven't visited LivingSocial in the past two days (which really wouldn't be surprising), then you wouldn't have noticed that the site and its apps were all down. It's back up now, as of about 9 a.m., but for the about 40 hours since Tuesday around 3 p.m., the site showed the landing page above with the reassuring message that this was part of scheduled maintenance and there were "Monsters at work." How cute.
Really, it wasn't scheduled, but more of an internal flaw in the system. Soon after the outage, LivingSocial threw this up on their blog:
An internal error caused our website and mobile app to go down on Tuesday afternoon (EST). We were alerted immediately to the outage and have had teams working non-stop to resolve the issue. We have isolated the problem and will have the site up and running again as soon as possible. There is nothing to indicate that this was the result of any external factors.
Pretty optimistic at that point, it looked like they'd have things taken care of in a jiffy. But poor LivingSocial can't seem to do anything right lately, and the trend continued into this outage. The outage continued into Wednesday, and LivingSocial pretty much said the same thing again in a blog post. Perhaps they hadn't "isolated the problem" as they described the day before.
Continuing into the evening hours of last night, they posted again:
Suffice to say, we are ashamed and embarrassed.
Our teams continue to work to address the internal issues with our website and mobile app – we anticipate that our systems will be live overnight here in DC.
We know you are frustrated. So are we.
We will do better and we will be back. We are committed to making this right with you, our customers and our merchants.
Last time I checked, they were still embarrassed and making it up to their customers for hosting a Halloween party with Anti-Semitic decorations – or is this the perfect strategy to divert attention away from that? Either way, their anticipation of an overnight re-launch of the site was a miss. It wasn't until well into Thursday morning that they had the problem resolved.
So what caused this technical malfunction, or as they'd describe it, 40 hour scheduled maintenance period? Multiple sources confirmed that it was not a malicious attack. And if we're to believe this was part of some routine care for the site, then all signs point to complete carelessness as the cause of the blunder. Typically when a professional, quality website collapses on itself, the IT is expected to revive it in some form in minutes, an hour tops. I'll let you do the math on this one.
At this point, you have to just feel pity for LivingSocial and its employees. Or, you can be like Will Oremus of Slate and show utter disgust:
Hey, LivingSocial: You guys gave it your best shot. You had some good times there for a while. But maybe the next time you’re inches from bankruptcy, you should go ahead and pull the plug rather than sucking up another $110 million in life support. Come to think of it, why not do it right now? I'm sure many of your employees are very smart people, with far more worthwhile projects ahead of them. And I think the rest of the world has already learned to go on without you.
He does bring up a good point. It's only a matter of time before LivingSocial begins laying people off again to save them from the sinking ship. Or at least that seems like the right thing to do.
