If your data center experienced an outage due to an ISP problem, the first thing you probably do is go to a terminal and execute your nifty command line tools. These tools give you a lot of information, textually. However, troubleshooting network outages aren't always easy, as slow connections or outages may be caused by issues outside your corporate network and parsing all this data is hard.

On that October day, a nuclear physicist, Dr. William 'Willy' Higinbotham, had prepared something special for Brookhaven's guests. In the past, he had noticed that visitors didn't connect well with the static displays shown at the fair. Willy wanted to create something more compelling for the lab's visitors to interact with. Along with his colleague, Dave Potter, Willy devised an idea to create an interactive experience for their visitors.

For most people, crashing means either an application has frozen or entirely disappeared. Sometimes, this is followed by a dialog box asking “Would you like to send a crash report?” Users hit “Send” and move on with their lives, and, most of the time, never think about that moment again. But there is an entire world behind that interaction which is key to driving technology forward.

At BugSplat, we are passionate about preventing software and video game crashes—but not all crashes are caused by bugs in code! In the early 80’s the video game industry was booming in North America - the price of home consoles had dropped, and the demand for new video games was skyrocketing. The video game craze had everyone wanting to play video games, and companies were scrambling to meet the demands of consumers. The stage was set for the most famous video game crash in history.

I personally know a few people that expressed their lack of interest in taking courses aimed at improving their skills in their field of work, even though they were free. For me, this just doesn’t make sense.

Whether there’s a crisis or scheduled maintenance on your servers, you need to keep your customers informed during these down times. Instead of using multiple tools in your crisis management process, your IT team can use one platform. Status pages can solve multiple issues in one location instead of using your web page, email, phone and ticket system to notify customers. This also helps to let them know about maintenance updates before they happen.

Nobody likes an unavailable website. But if you must take your site offline, a clear and well-designed maintenance page can turn around a bad experience.