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Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?

I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.

They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.

"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."

The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.

Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.

Comments
  • 15
    Yup, this is support 101.

    "This is a P1 issue we need this fixed by close of play today"

    "We sent this support request 20 minutes ago, and still no response, what's going on?"

    "Hi, we've investigated this issue and found it's a fault with one of your Salesforce triggers. You'll need to fix this in order for (blah) to start working again."

    ...silence for 2 weeks...
  • 0
    Update: site is still down. Nobody seems to care any more. At least they're no longer bothering me about something I can't fix.
  • 0
    It's been over three months. The site is still down. I've reached a point where just seeing that error page brightens my day, because there is no greater catharsis than laughing at other peoples' incompetence.
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