No news isn’t good news

Following on from my previous post, Media24.com meltdown, and on a more serious note, there's a good lesson to be learnt in how to correctly respond to technical failures or emergency situations online. Or in News24.com's case, how not to respond.According to readership statistics (.XLS download) published by the OPA of South Africa, News24.com received a monthly average of 1,491,338 unique browsers (and 21,763,639 page impressions) over the third quarter of 2006. That puts them at the number one spot for most visited website in South Africa, ahead of IOL, MWEB (who together with News24 are a subsidiary of Naspers), M&G Online and lastly iafrica.com who make up the top 5. It's also interesting to note how many Media24 brands follow not far behind, in the top 20.

News24.com, along with other Media24 brands (Finance24.com for example), went down yesterday evening citing "technical difficulties". As I write this, it's now over 24 hours later and nothing has changed. In that amount of time, in response to this intensifying disaster, this broken page is the best response they could manage. Aside from the fact that the page is borrowed from a template for a "Newsletter subscribtion (sic) confirmation" (see the page title), the irony of the message they're sending to their 50,000 daily visitors, is that it's now old news. Over 24 hours old.

I just visited Eskom's site who, after this morning's nationwide power cuts, are redirecting their home page traffic to this Load Shedding page which contains links to regional information and their latest press release. A timely and competent response to what could potentially have resulted in innumerous support e-mails and phone calls from irate customers - although this most likely happened regardless but to a lesser degree. I get the impression they (well, their web team at least) are learning from their mistakes which for me is one of the biggest reassurances.

I realise the two can't be compared, but you get my point. News24.com should be doing more. Maybe their hands are tied, I don't know. We'll have to wait for the insider info to surface or headlines to appear once they manage to restore their site to normal operating levels.

Biggest website in South Africa falls over, technicians spend a day in vain trying to restore

I doubt they're that courageous.