> The fix went out less than half an hour after they learned about it,
The article says the issues started on Friday and users told them then. So, it seems to be three days for a fix, not half an hour.
The article says the issues started on Friday and users told them then. So, it seems to be three days for a fix, not half an hour.
You are trying to conflate 2 different metrics. The first assertion, is from the time the ticket was investigated, not submitted.
It might be useful to talk about expectation of service, since that's what you are getting at. 3 days (over a weekend) is reasonable for a free tier, I would think. For a paid tier, maybe it should be more immediate.
This line of reasoning sounds backwards to me. It is the importance of the service that drives the needed level of reliability and people should expect there to be a cost to match that level of urgency and have guarantees that the vendor understands and will meet those needs.
If LastPass expects user password management (aka consumer access to websites) to require under two 9's, they are wrong. If they can't meet a minimum level of reliability with a free tier, they should not be offering a free tier.
For most services, I'd expect free tiers to be strict subsets of paid tiers. I'd expect them to be running the same code, often on the same servers, as paid tiers. Free tier accounts would for the most part just have different per account settings.
If that is the case, and I was a paid tier user, I would be upset if it takes days to respond to problems on the free tier because if free tier accounts are running into problems there is a good chance paid tier accounts are also running into problems.
Maybe the problem really is one that only affects free tiers--something like, say, a load balancer mistakenly thinking the servers are overloaded and dropping free tier requests to ensure that paid tiers get served.
Perhaps then maybe you can make a case that it is OK to not fix it over a weekend. But even in that case there should be a prompt investigation when the free tier users start reporting problems in order to determine if it is something that will also hurt paid tier users.
If that investigation finds that it won't affect paid tiers, there should then at least be a status update explaining this. Free tier users are going to be Tweeting about, posting to HN and Reddit, etc., where paid tier users are going to see it.
You need to assure your paid tier users that things are fine for them and they aren't going to have their weekend messed up dealing with your outage.