I was listening to Arvid Kahl’s latest podcast episode on my morning walk today, where he talked about Facebook’s recent 6 hour outage, and how you can ‘judo’ negative things like server downtime into a positive outcome.

As a former student of the martial arts, I love that term. Judo is all about using your opponents strengths and turning them into a weakness in certain situations, and I’d like to think that the reverse is true as well.

Here is my story - just over a year ago, we had one of our most serious server outages in my SaaS startup. Our main app server crashed at about 2am my time. This was before I had set up any sort of emergency escalation routine in our company to handle such outages, and as luck would have it, I was the only one at the time who could reset the servers, and it happened right in the middle of my sleep routine.

By the time my team reached me, and I was able to fix the problem at get things running again, our servers were offline for about 3 hours. To this date the longest outage we’ve ever had.

When I went to check my emails at the start of my normal work time, exhausted after a sleepless night, I saw one particular email in my flooded Inbox from a particular customer, and she was extremely irate and threatened to cancel her subscription with us. Most other customer were just mildly annoyed and were straightforward to placate, but this one email stood out to me.

I was gutted to receive such an message - probably the first such email I had received in running my startup (and to date, I think the only example of one), and I was initially just going to rescind and agree to cancel that customer’s account and help her move her data off our system.

But then I though, No, let me take the more human approach here, and explain to her how we are a small company, and I am the one in charge of our servers and I had a particular hard day that day helping my son with a tough assignment and was so tired I had slept through the first few times my team had frantically tried to call me to tell me things were not working. I wasn’t side stepping the issue, but instead admitted that we had failed, and personally took responsibility.

(Side note: We have since put in place several steps to ensure that the team can respond to server outages in a more timely manner, and we use the escalation policies on the excellent BetterUptime service to ensure this).

Well, a few hours after sending that email, I received a response from this customer apologising for her harsh tone on her earlier email, and she (Carmen) said she was stressed and working late too, and knew what it was like to help kids with their school work.

Long story short, she ended up staying on as a customer, but not only that, she became one of our loudest advocates and started recommending us to other colleagues of hers. Carmen even sent in a testimonial video completely off her own back and unasked by us. We used it on a special case study on her and her organisation on our marketing website.

Carmen has since moved on from her role at that particular company, and in fact we are in talks to see if she can join our team as a customer evangelist and customer success person!

I am so glad that we managed to turn what could have been a really negative episode for our company into something so positive. Sometime in the big, dark world of online businesses, it pays to be human and transparent.