When a website crashes, who gets the call?
The pressure to keep a Fortune 500 website up and running could make an Instant Pot crumble. Downtimes for popular cloud providers are measured in hundredths of a percent (99.99%), because uptime is serious money.
When Amazon went down for 63 minutes during Prime Day 2018, Coresight Research estimated that the company lost $99m in revenue.
What angry shoppers didn’t see…
… were the adrenaline-soaked engineers scrambling to get Amazon back online while ~$1.5m/minute was lost.
In HR-speak, these people responsible for keeping websites humming have many titles like Operations Engineer, but often they are referred generally as sysadmins. And forget diamonds — the pressure these sysadmins feel is black-hole-inducing.
Some sysadmins recount times when they had to duck out of holiday parties, pull off busy freeways to take calls, and enter “war rooms.”
Many organizations don’t give them much recognition
Because when sysadmins do their job perfectly… nothing happens. But when a crisis comes up, sysadmins are there for each other, taking to social to share #Hugops. It’s become the de facto bat signal for engineers to pitch in and support their IT comrades.
Sometimes it’s as simple as, “Hey, I feel for ya” — while other times, they’re called on for more complex technical fixes. So next time your favorite website goes down, remember — don’t get mad… #hugops.
