Post #4016279

2026-07-22 14:56 UTC

My ISP is upgrading our email server from 9am to 3pm on a weekday. My bank is upgrading their automatic bill pay system a few days before the end of the month right when rent checks need to be mailed to arrive by the 1st. Was there an IT conference talk that said maximum customer disruption is good actually and now that’s industry practice?

Replies (4)

@me@social.taupehat.com 2026-07-22 16:06

@rocketsoup@mastodon.social as someone on a team that manages (among other things) email infrastructure for an ISP, I can't speak for why your ISP and bank scheduled things the way they did, but I can say that the number of highly critical security vulns hitting the CVE list right now is absolutely insane, worst I can remember in decades of doing this work. That said, the only time we would ever bring down customer-facing infra during the day would be a true emergency. We would never schedule it for the day.

Open ##4016278
@OneInterestingFact@mastodon.ie 2026-07-22 15:55

@rocketsoup@mastodon.social Obviously it’s more expensive to do these things out of normal business hours… So, shareholder value trumps everything. And why not? Fuck customers.

Open ##4033330
@mvilain@sfba.social 2026-07-22 16:16

@rocketsoup@mastodon.social Sometimes, managers forget to coordinate people's vacations. All the senior SREs are having fun somewhere else while the junior SREs and interns are running things. Then an intern points out that support for AWS' Postgres 8 is ending on Friday and BANG, major database upgrade project in 2 days is born. Yes, this really happened to me. I sent out a company-wide email that a major customer's Postgres HAD to be upgraded. No objections for 2 days. 30 minutes into the 5pm upgrade, the sales manager calls to postpone it. Bzzzzt. Happened anyway as AWS' automated upgrades can't be stopped. Yes, I backed up everything beforehand.

Open ##4033336
@ainiriand@mastodon.social 2026-07-22 16:17

@rocketsoup@mastodon.social and here I am rolling out releases of Ad-Tech services at 5am... God forbids someone misses an ad... lol

Open ##4033337