Did you have problems using Ancestry.com the other night? It probably wasn’t because of something wrong with your computer. The popular genealogy website had it’s second site outage in less than a month. The issue, whatever it was, has been resolved, but it is leaving people who pay for the service with some questions.
On August 9, 2012, the popular genealogy website, Ancestry.com, experienced a site outage. It carried over into August 10, 2012 before things got resolved. Since the website was inaccessible, someone at Ancestry.com posted a status on their Facebook page that noted that they were aware of the outage, and were working on it.
At around 10:00 in the morning on August 10, 2012, Ancestry.com posted an update to let members know that the website was working again. They posted it as a comment on their Facebook page under the comments of dozens of members who had questions about when the site would be working again. The apology said:
“We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. While the majority of the site issues have been resolved, we are aware that some users may not be able to attach records to their trees and we are working to resolve that issue at this time. In the mean time, if you are experiencing other issues with the site, please try some of these suggestions mentioned here to resolve them”.
The suggestions were ideas about what members could do to their own computers in order to be able to properly access the Ancestry.com website again. Customers are never happy when a website that they pay to use goes down, even for a short time. Often, the suggestions about fixing your computer comes across as though the company is saying “It’s not our fault, it is your fault – for not keeping your computer up to date and virus free”.
On August 30, 2012, Ancestry.com experienced another site outage. This time, they posted about it on their Twitter account. The tweet read:
“Sorry for the search outages on @ancestrydotcom, please stay tuned as we are fixing the errors now and will have the functionality up soon.”
It wasn’t long before an update was posted to the once again functioning Ancestry.com website. It was titled “UPDATED: Site outages resolved”, and it reads:
“We are currently working through the search errors on Ancestry.com. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience, please stay with us while we work through this issue. Any details we are abel to share, we’ll continually update this blog post. Please stay tuned. UPDATE: The search errors have been resolved as of 3:40 pm ET. Thank you for your patience!”
This, second, outage is raising questions. Some feel that the problem is linked to the extra traffic on Ancestry.com due to the website releasing all Census information for free this weekend. Others, who just signed up for a fourteen day free trial, wonder if they will get back the day they lost due to the outage. Members are becoming frustrated.
Image by QuesterMark on Flickr