Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > April > 18 > Entry
Blackberry and Turbotax Users: Welcome to Web Crash 2.0
It’s been a bad 24 hours for Blackberry users and last-minute tax filers. Research in Motion’s Blackberry network went down, causing e-mails to be delayed into today. And a surge of tax filers swamped Turbo Tax’s site, causing confirmations that a filing was successful to be delayed.
The bad news is: Expect this to happen more, especially as companies are taken by surprise by big spontaneous events or fail to plan accordingly for their businesses to scale up. Even seemingly invincible Web applications like Gmail have recently had troubles with outages.
As we continue to rely on our information stored and pushed online (our work e-mail, for instance, sits on a server and when that server is down, that e-mail is inaccessible), it leaves us pretty helpless when these things happen. It’s like trying to make a cell phone call while standing in the middle of the Austin City Limits festival.
The best advice I can give? For mission-critical work information, contacts and documents, make sure you have a readily accessible copy on your hard drive, PDA, thumb drive or any other place you feel comfortable keeping your goods. You never realize how important that stuff can be until you can’t get to it.
Permalink | | Categories: Applications, Internet, Phones
