37signals Product Blog

Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008

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.

What are the implications of this transition?

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.

Why are we making this change?

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

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.

Launch: Announcing the new 37signals Affiliate Program (with recurring income)!

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.

"They call it Open Bar, I call it awesome!"

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.

Learn more about 37signals Open Bar.

Download issues update

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 simplifies billing tasks for 37signals customers

From Signal vs. Noise:

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.

Read the whole post to learn more.

Where to get status updates from 37signals

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.

What happened this morning?

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 [email protected] 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.

New 37signals Twitter stream

We're experimenting with a Twitter stream: Twitter.com/37signals. We plan on posting status updates for 37signals products, occasional links to interesting posts, and, well, we'll see. If you have a suggestion for what you'd like to see there, let us know.

Are you also reading Signal vs. Noise?

You already know this Product Blog is the place to turn for news on 37signals products. But did you also know that Signal vs. Noise, our company blog, serves up a daily dose of our thoughts on design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and lots more? It was recently ranked #1 at a list of the top 100 user-centered blogs. Grab the RSS feed and see why over 78,000 people have already subscribed.

Downtime explanation

At around 7:40pm CST November 12, our products, forums, and email support systems went offline. The downtime lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The good news: No data was lost.

We apologize for the downtime

We're deeply sorry for the downtime. We understand you rely on us to be reliable. We apologize for letting you down on this occasion. We will be reevaluating our disaster preparedness in response to this situation.

Here's what happened

At about 6pm CST, Rackspace, our primary data center provider, experienced a significant "power event" which ultimately included a dual cooling system failure and multiple transformer shutdown.

Here's the chain of events as reported by Rackspace:

1. At approximately 6pm CST a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer which provides utility power to the Rackspace data center in Dallas, TX.

2. Power automatically switched over to backup generators without disrupting service for any customers.

3. When generator power was established two chillers within the data center failed to start back up.

4. Utility power was re-established through a secondary utility source.

5. As a result of temporary data center temperature increases, Rackspace proactively shutdown a number of customer servers to protect them from overheating around 7:40pm CST.

6. As of 8:45pm CST the chillers were back up and running and we are operating on generator power throughout the data center. Servers are being powered back up as the temperature drops.

Our servers began being restored at approximately 10:15pm CST.

Thanks for hanging in there

Will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience. While our systems are engineered to chug through major failure, this "perfect storm" chain of events beat both our set-up and our data center's sophisticated back-up systems. We will work hard to further diversify our systems in order to make any future downtime event like this even more rare.

We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime caused your business. If you feel you were significantly impacted by this downtime, please send an email to support and we'll credit you for the downtime.