I spent 14 years running a small software company in Kansas City. During my time writing software for numerous customer, I had issues that produced outages. What I learned was it was always best to fess up and tell the truth. If you are truthful in the small things, you’re probably truthful in the big things. Customers recognize that.

This morning my phone rang at 9:20 AM Central US time. NetSuite was down! Let me run back through what I experienced, just to document. I’ll tell you my version of the truth! Let me add, I’m a NetSuite fan! I recommend NetSuite as an excellent cloud based ERP provider and will continue to recommend them to other businesses. Do they always tell the truth? Hmmm… You can judge for yourself.

• 9:20 – NetSuite status page shows no problems. Last update was from 1/12/2022
• My users were seeing this message
  

• I called NetSuite support and got a message that all lines were busy
• I started monitoring a forum for NetSuite outages. I posted this at 10:05 CST.

• By 10:15, NetSuite updated their status page as follows.

• At 10:25, I got through to NetSuite support. I posted this in the forum.

• At 11:05 AM I posted this in the forum.

• At 11:20 AM NetSuite was back online

During the outage, I noted NetSuite customers from all over North America, Mexico, UK, Canada, Singapore who could not login to production NetSuite. In the US, users from New York, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and of course Kansas City were also unable to login. The NetSuite status page has confirmed an outage in the US Seattle data center. That’s probably true, even though it defies common logic.

And one more note about being truthful. If NetSuite would debrief us, as customers with more detail, perhaps we’d be more inclined to believe that this outage was limited to just their west coast US data center customers.

As a footnote: 30 days per month. 24 hours per day. 99.98% available or 0.02% unavailable.
30 * 24 * (1 – 0.9998) = 8 minutes 38 seconds a month.