For most of Wednesday and Thursday, the to-do list management service Wunderlist was unavailable. They haven’t published a public post mortem, though I’ve asked if they plan on it. It has to be a hell of a problem since it resulted in such a long outage.

I think they handled it fairly well, though. Logins were disabled in order to prevent further problems and regular updates were posted to the status page. I’d have preferred that the login page were redirected to the status site. I took a guess at the address and it was right, but I’m not sure all users would have done that. It might have saved their support team some effort.

The status page promised updates in various non-specific time frames. I’d have liked “we’ll provide another update at $specific_time”. When the specified time rolls around, if there’s nothing to say, just say “no new updates, we’ll update again at $blah”. And speaking of times, having the current time on the page is helpful for a global service, since not all users know what your time zone offset is.

On a more personal note, I was pleasantly surprised with how well I managed without my outsourced brain. Wunderlist has become a critical extension of my brain. Fortunately, I didn’t have much pressing due during the outage. But it did make me miss my old days of using TuDu running in a screen session.