Payment Processor Response

My paper letter to the CEO of First Data resulted in two phone calls from them, and a very good phone call from the director of their online payment processor.  He shared with me the reasons for the 3 outages we experienced (upgrade to new version of Oracle db, out of disk space on a disk which wasn't being monitored, and redundant dns server failures).  I shared my thoughts about how the reasons for the failure were important (when they are down, we do not make any money), but that the communication was even more important.  Knowing what was going on lessens the frustration from a customers point of view, which is exactly why we started this blog.  Sharing our outages and the reasons for our mistakes, and how we're going to fix them in the future, lets our customers know that we try to be perfect, but we'll admit our mistakes when we aren't.

Hopefully the message got through.  Thanks for the phone call First Data!