That's a really nice status dashboard, tracking and publicly displaying your 98th% is really cool. On the other hand stuff like this:
"13:17 UTC We are seeing unicorns ..."
Comes off as un-professional at exactly the wrong moment.
"13:17 UTC We are seeing unicorns ..."
Comes off as un-professional at exactly the wrong moment.
Gives me the impression there are actually real people trying to fix things, not just blank-faced robo admins following company policy HOWTO-Fix guides.
That github isn't a blank sheet devoid of life and emotion and all 'professional' is the reason I'm willing to shrug off downtime like this.
If anything, I really feel for whoever posted:
We do not expect this to have visible impact to
customers, but will update status if that changes.
Just shows people aren't perfect. Haven't we all been there?
(I do agree though that it does feel like a slap in the face to say: "Hey there shouldn't be any problems! Never mind, we were wrong...")
Did you ever have a piece of code that should be impossible to reach under normal conditions? Did you put a message there to remind yourself that the case in question should never, ever occur?
That could be a unicorn.
For extra credit, if you have put these messages in your code, have you seen all of them at one time or another? I certainly have!
This is more professional reporting than most companies do.
I have no idea what this means, but I can see how the idea of coming up with an alternate language in which fantasy creatures represent things we already have established words for might seem unprofessional
So when they say 'we saw unicorns' they literally saw (reports of people seeing) pictures of unicorns. Now I understand that might confuse someone who does not regularily use github, but it is just a term that is in their jargon and I see no reason why they should market-speak that up in an intermediate status message. (Note that these status messages are not press releases but reports that engineers make during the discovery process)
It's the exact same linguistic process that lets Americans refer to the executive branch of government as "the white house". I'd hardly call it unprofessional.
Unicorns are also supposed to be these rare, mythical beasts which I'd say is exactly the kind of imagery you want representing your server errors.
But you should really learn to take the meaning of an unknown term from context if you don't know what it means.
As for the accusations of unprofessionalism -- I'll take vivid metaphor [1] like "seeing unicorns" over a dull monotone description like "our site is experiencing server errors."
[1] As other replies have pointed out, in this case it's not a metaphor; people are (or were, as the case may be) literally staring at pictures of unicorns.
And if "seeing unicorns" was a code word for a specific kind of errors, then again I would rather have a more descriptive terminology and not one that I may confuse for an inside joke.
Status messages should be communicated with no unnecessary ambiguity both internally (where unicorns may be the clearest term) and externally (where it is not).
Lack of clarity during periods of heavy human workload is a common cause of e.g. plane crashes. Operations people of the internet would do well to learn from mistakes made before the cloud was a thing.
If you get bent out of shape over some pretty mild slang, there are loads of companies out there who'll take your money for as staid a response as you'd like.
If you don't already know that "unicorns" means in this context, then you are not a GitHub user, and thus it being down is not a "high pressure environment".
No, adding a touch of humor is highly professional, not to mention good marketing.
Remember, they are not marketing to enterprise managers, rural Utah programmers, or corporate 80's programmers in suits, but to todays and tomorrows "hip" programmers.
Now, some of today's programmers arguably square and adhere to BS 50's professionalism ideas (where professional = boring, somber and well groomed) but most would take the unicorns over any kind of "professional" copy text.