General Flakiness
Everything seems to be breaking. Google Calendar went down last week just as I was trying to add some critical information. The error reporting was not exactly stellar - “You’re event could not be saved” etc - until I tried to reconnect and was bounced to my Google Account page. This is a Beta service after all, so occasional unplanned outages are to be expected.
No excuse for BT, however, as those are supposed to be robust customer-facing systems. Yesterday I was travelling and had remembered to set up my BT Openzone £10/month account before leaving. Nice deal if I can get it to work. T-Mobile at Starbucks told me that too many people were already using that account, whatever that means. BT Openzone at Stansted airport let me login, change password, and then - nothing! No connectivity, and it would not let me log in with either the starter password or the new one I set.
One comment on the £10/month account - it can only be linked with a BT Mobile or BT Broadband account, or paid directly from a credit card. Why not a BT landline?
Talking of which, I tried to check my on-line phone bill. It won’t let me log in. So I get them to send me the password. Initially that puts me to a nice empty page. I come out and try again, this time it lets me change the password, then redirects to a lovely blank page. Sigh. Does nobody test anything?
Picking up on Google Calendar again, the outage highlights what might be a more general problem with Ajax-based solutions. The user interface runs happily in the browser, but isn’t able to tell me that the backend has really, really, really gone away. I don’t know when it came back up again, but I’d have been surprised if it had recovered cleanly.
