Website down during working hours?

[swgiles]

I want to bring to Fido's attention that I tried to log into the website to access my account this morning, and I was unable to due to "unexpected demand" or some such reason.

When I used my phone to call Fido, the support rep told me that "this is normal", the servers were undergoing maintenance, and would not be available for 2 hours.

I work in IT.  Cardinal rule around here is that you never do maintenance during working hours that would affect users.  I would expect the same standard at a business as big and important as Fido.  Is that an unrealistic expectation?

[FidoGabrielle]

Hello there @swgiles!

Welcome to the Fido community.

I understand where you're coming from and we do our best to run these maintenances outside of working hours, however sometimes we need to make exceptions. We try as much as possible to keep these instances to a minimum.

We do appreciate your feedback, and don't hesitate to reach out if you still need help! 

[swgiles]

Thanks for the response, Gabrielle, much appreciated!

In the whole interaction, I was surprised that the outage actually had nothing to do with the message that I got when I tried to log in ("overwhelming demand for our new offers", or something like that), but that it was simply maintenance.

If the message said something like "Maintenance, back at approx xx:xx", that would be helpful.  The message that I got was misleading (I would hope not intentionally!) and was not helpful at all in helping me plan my day as to when I would be able to get the important piece of information from my account.  "Overwhelming demand..." suggests to me that your web servers are undersized, and when this shortfall will be corrected, or customer demand fall off, is an indeterminate amount of time. 

Clear, straightforward communication always wins for everybody!

Thanks in advance for forwarding this concern to the appropriate IT parties in Fido.

[FidoPamela]

We'll sure forward your comments on your behalf. Thanks a lot for taking the time to send them in. 

We're here if there's anything else you need