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A marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business is using 37signals as a case study in his summer marketing course:
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Hopefully we're on the opposite side of the spectrum as Enron! Learn about our approach to marketing in our book Getting Real.
The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard is a comprehensive security standard that establishes common processes and precautions for handling, processing, storing and transmitting credit card data. All 37signals products are fully PCI compliant which means an extra layer of security on top of our already state-of-the-art security. What all that means: You can rest easy knowing all your credit cardholder information is secure from any possible security breaches.
This evening all apps were offline for about two hours due to a power and cooling failure at the data center in Texas. Hardware was shut down for precautionary reasons so it didn't overheat.
Updates were posted to the 37signals System Status Site. At 9:25pm CST all service was restored.
We are currently awaiting an official incident report from Rackspace, the data center operator. Once we have the official response we will post it here.
We're very sorry for the unexpected downtime. We appreciate your patience, understanding, and continued business.
If you feel your work was negatively affected because of this outage, please write support@37signals.com (and include your application URL) and we’ll handle compensation.
UPDATE: Rackspace just posted the official explanation of the downtime:
At approximately 5:00 P.M. CDT, our DFW data center experienced a brief loss of utility power that required a transfer to generator power. During the transition, two external chillers which run on independent generators, were brought online manually and efforts to switch a third internal chiller to generator power began. The first attempt failed, and a subsequent attempt to bring an additional chiller online was made. At that point, it was decided to transfer the data center over to the second utility feed and bring up an internal chiller on utility power. Once that internal chiller was brought online, there was a failure of an external unit, but the second internal chiller was brought up immediately. During this process the temperatures in the data center quickly increased which caused disruption to some customer equipment.
We were able to identify that the control system for the internal chillers prevented the initial startup under generator power due to a sequencing issue. We have the chiller and electrical contractor’s onsite working with the data center engineering team to resolve the issues that prevented the rapid startup of an internal chiller after utility power loss. We will continue to provide updates to the support teams as the root cause issues are resolved.
Rackspace sincerely apologizes for any inconvenience this incident might have caused you or your customers. Please let us know if you have any further questions or comments around this incident.
On August 15th, 2008 October 1, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products. In order to continue using the products without any hiccups, Internet Explorer 6 users should upgrade to a newer browser:
Download Internet Explorer 7
Download Firefox
Download Safari
The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it's time to finally move beyond IE 6.
As of August 15th, 2008 October 1, 2008, future features and any improvements made to existing features may not work with IE 6. If you are using IE 7, Firefox 2 or 3, or Safari, you don't have to do anything — everything will continue as is for you. However, if you are using IE 6, and you want to make sure everything works, you will need to upgrade your browser to either IE 7, Firefox, or Safari. All of these browsers are free and all of them will deliver a much better overall experience. The web will be a lot better for you.
Special note for people using Basecamp with clients: If your clients are using IE 6 (you'll want to ask them) you may want to provide them some assistance in upgrading their browser.
IE 6 is a last-generation browser. This means that IE 6 can't provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 means that we can't optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.
Thanks again for your continued support. We look forward to dropping the rusty weight of IE 6 and improving the overall customer experience moving forward.
Updated: We have extended the IE 6 transition from August 15, 2008 to October 1, 2008. We hope this extension gives you additional time to make the necessary arrangements to upgrade your web browsers.
We've got a very exciting announcement today. We're launching a new 37signals Affiliate Program. This one pays cash and there's a twist we think you'll really like. Read all about it at Signal vs. Noise.
Gavin Baker is part of the marketing team at Abunga.com. He recently sang the praises of 37signals Open Bar, which lets you quickly switch between your accounts on different 37signals products.
So like many companies, at Abunga.com we use 37signals Basecamp as our online project management tool - both internally to manage projects, vendors and interns, but also externally with our design firm.So we were juggling two accounts - and I was thinking, why can’t we combine these somehow, and then those smart people, they went ahead and did it.
So as of earlier this week if you change all your log-in’s for the different Basecamp accounts (or any 37signals product) to OpenID, you’ll see a change in your Basecamp like below, where my three accounts are listed at the top, and you can move between them seemlessly. They call it Open Bar and I call it awesome!
A look at Abunga's Open Bar.
Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire use a service called S3 by Amazon to host the files you upload. At about 7:00am CST (13:00 GMT) their service experienced an outage that is affecting our products as well as thousands of other companies around the world that rely on the S3 service to host files. Amazon's IT staff is looking into the issue and "is working as quickly as possible to restore performance." We'll post updates when we have them. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update 9:00am CST (15:00 GMT): Amazon S3 has partially restored service. It looks like they are bringing everything back up on line. We'll post another update when they're fully back. Thanks again for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.
Update 9:10am CST (15:10 GMT): It appears Amazon S3 has been fully restored. Downloads should be working again. When Amazon posts the official explanation for the downtime we'll be sure to link to it here. Thanks again for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.
Queen Bee is the name of our new, internal, unified billing, admin, and stats platform. Here's an example of how it will make things easier for customers:
So, let's say you have two Basecamp accounts and a Highrise account and you want to update your credit card because it's about to expire. Before Queen Bee you'd have to log into each account separately, click the Account tab, click the "change card" tab, and update your card. But now all you have to do is pick any account to update and you'll see a screen that look like this:
You'll see that if you have multiple accounts with us on the same credit card you'll be asked if you want to update all the accounts or just one (or two) of the accounts. This makes our customer's administrative tasks (updating cards, for example) a lot easier. Hassle be gone.
If you're ever having trouble reaching a 37signals site (including our products), then check the 37signals System Status page. We'll always post the latest news there on any service issues. The 37status Twitter stream will also keep you up to date on the latest news. Since both of these are hosted independently, we can post updates there even if there's an episode with our normal servers.
All the 37signals properties were offline for two hours this morning between 10AM and 12PM CST (16:00 to 18:00 GMT) as our load balancer blew out and knocked out the network connection for all our servers. No data was lost and the machines all kept running, but they weren't accessible from the internet.
We're very, very sorry for this interruption of service. While we were able to report on the progress of this interruption through our http://status.37signals.com (all the products and 37signals.com pointed to that site during the majority of the outage) that's a small consolation when you want to access data stored on our services right now. It was just not good enough.
While we don't have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we'll get that taken care of.
Naturally, we're going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They're supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We'll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.
Again, we're truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.
