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Comment by tompic823 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but the number of outages recently has been a little concerning. There has been at least one outage per month for the past several months. And what's worse is that I've never seen a postmortem published. It's hard to maintain confidence in a service that isn't being transparent about why they keep having outages, or what they're doing to prevent future outages.

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What did their support say when you wrote them and asked for a post-mortem details?

I haven't gone as far as emailing support, but my single tweet asking if there would be a postmortem after a previous incident did not receive a reply. My other tweets to them, such as inquiring about a recent increase in spam, received replies.

I've admittedly put in very little effort to obtain postmortems from Fastmail. But I also posit that I shouldn't have to. Postmortems should be made readily accessible, just as the outage was. I reserve my detective skills for figuring out my own service's outages.

I don't use Twitter and I don't read their blog, so if I wanted to see their post-mortems, I would have just asked their paid support no matter whether they've made one readily accessible or not.

It seems like your primary goal is to call them out, rather than to get an explanation, and so I don't really have any advice to offer in that regard.

Post mortems should be published and easily accessible via status pages.[0] Otherwise, what’s the point? The parent wasn’t asking for advice; they were complaining that no post mortem was published via the expected channels. I agree with the parent: they shouldn’t have to contact support to get that information. If I’m paying for a service, generally, I want transparency without needing to hunt down info.

These priorities and expectations aren’t universal, but they’re common enough and perfectly reasonable.

[0]: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

If it’s not public—if a customer needs to go out of their way ask—then it largely defeats the transparency that I personally value. I suspect I’m not alone in this sentiment.

Also, since the parent didn’t mention writing to support, your response comes across as condescending and passive-aggressive. I’m not sure it was intended that way, but it reads as though you fully expected that the parent never wrote to support in the first place. If that tone was intentional, HN really isn’t the place for that sort of attitude. Simply suggest that they write to support—no need to be condescending about it.

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