"Julie Pelloille
@juliepelloille Replying to
@gandi_net @andreaganduglia and 4 others
This post was disrespectful. It's not an excuse, but this is a stressful situation and the thread was getting heated. Either way, I truly regret posting it and it was my decision alone to do so. Please don't take this as representative of the high standard Gandi sets"
"That said, for the sake of transparency, we won't be deleting the tweet -- Julie"
So what. Just because you send a retraction doesn't justify it or make the apology any better. That sounds like they allow some people too much freedom as if they ran this business in their parents garage.
...not losing data is the ONE thing I expect companies to get right. I could handle downtime, circular customer support, high prices, horrible UX, and all that. But losing or corrupting data? Heck no.
A company that loses customer data in production is the exact type I would expect to mock their customers using memes.
I don't blame the communications rep. From her perspective, she's probably been told what the CEO believes - Gandi lost data, but they never promised backups so it's not a big deal. They responded to someone that is being extremely critical. The rep (Julie) did the right thing and apologised after others criticised her tweet, and also kept the response up to illustrate the mistake. While a meme is bad taste, I can somewhat understand the reaction.
IMO, the blame lies solely with the CEO, because he is still to retract his statement regarding snapshots not being backups (despite their site selling them as backups to the end-user), and for not accepting the fact that for someone controlling business data that creating backups AND regularly testing them via restores is 100% essential. Culture trickles down, and if the CEO only accepts blame and not the reason for the blame then it's a sign that they won't learn from the problem - and that's the biggest red flag you will ever see in ANY business.
I can only see one way back for them that won't taint their reputation completely. They need to:
* Post a full post-mortem of what happened, how it happened, how they fixed it, and what they're going to do to ensure it never happens again.
* Issue a full apology for the problem. Accept full blame, and accept (including the CEO on Twitter) that Gandi failed to follow accepted industry standards.
* Sit down with the engineers that work at Gandi and hear their grievances. While I doubt that their engineers knew this would happen, I'd be willing to bet that there is at least one person there that had raised the lack of off-site backups and no recovery mechanism. That person needs a promotion, and whatever resources needed to fix Gandi.
* Issue a full refund to those that lost data - not a small discount, as already reported. A discount is a kick in the teeth, whereas a full refund is the start of a real apology for failing the customer. If you go for a meal at a restaurant and find broken glass in your food, the first thing the server will do is give you a full refund, no questions asked, regardless of how expensive your parties order was. Gandi need to take the hit, and live to fight another day.
I am moving my business away from them. Even if I didn't care about the backup situation, the PR response is stupidly immature and not worthy of reward.
It has long been the platform of choice for those seeking a response or to resolve issues. The tone of those ill mannered tweets reveals incredibly bad optics and serves as a reminder for those, who haven't encountered any issues thus far, that we could be treated in a similarly shoddy manner.
Well, that is explainable, unlike not making backups; they have what's called a PR or media team that gets updates and details from developers while they work on this.
Additionally, data recovery is a lot of waiting in most cases, there isn't much to do as your business burns down around you
This post was disrespectful. It's not an excuse, but this is a stressful situation and the thread was getting heated. Either way, I truly regret posting it and it was my decision alone to do so. Please don't take this as representative of the high standard Gandi sets"
"That said, for the sake of transparency, we won't be deleting the tweet -- Julie"