What do you do when your project management platform goes down on deadlines day? That's the issue Trello users faced on November 30th when the task-planning tool became unresponsive without warning.
Users were met with a slow-loading Trello dashboard, which soon stopped loading at all. Trello's Status page reported "an issue that's causing Trello to be slow or unavailable to our users" at 9:21am EST (2:21pm GMT).
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| Trello Status page, November 30th 2023, 4:35pm GMT |
With just three business hours left in November in the UK, losing access to your task-planning tool is less than ideal - so what can you do in such circumstances?
Have a Plan B
Preparedness is always a good idea. Having a Plan B in place helps to ensure business continuity, and is something I factor into my freelance work as routine.
In the case of Trello, I have several clients who use the platform, and it's a very handy tool for keeping track of individual items and orders - until it's not there anymore.
My backup plan in such circumstances is hardly high-tech, but I keep an Excel spreadsheet of orders received via Trello, including the name of the contact.
If Trello is down, this means I can still send out completed content via email, which is essential for SEO agency clients who need to meet THEIR deadline too.
Make Plan B Your Plan A
I can't stress enough the importance of having a backup plan in business. This is just one example of the extra measures I have in place to protect my work and deliver on time during an unexpected incident.
Some other examples of this include:
- Use cloud-based email (Gmail) so I can access my emails from any device.
- Use cloud-based storage (OneDrive) so I can access files from anywhere.
- Use software with version history (Office 365) so I can recover old and 'lost' files.
On any given day, I don't necessarily use all of these features - in fact I hope I don't have to - but even just using Office 365 with OneDrive means my work is saved to the cloud in real-time.
That (hopefully) means that although the unplanned will always happen eventually, there's much less chance of me being unable to deliver urgent content to my clients.
Wait It Out
Third-party platforms like Trello will experience downtime every so often. It's inevitable and as long as everyone recognises that, it isn't that big of a deal.
In this incident, Trello issued an update at 11:35am EST (4:35pm GMT) and my access had already been restored by that point.
"Our engineering team has identified an issue with Trello's database, and we're now working on implementing a fix to restore Trello's availability to all users. We appreciate everyone's understanding!"
Trello incident page, November 30th 2023, 4:35pm GMT
Brands rely on uptime as a selling point for their service - nobody wants to use an unreliable cloud platform - and two hours, even on deadline day, is a pretty fast turnaround for a technical fix.
If you use an online tool and it goes down without warning, check whether it's a known issue - or whether it only affects you - and then prepare to wait for a fix.
Put It All Together
In the end, it's a combination of all of the above that will get you through any severe outages - and your mission-critical data should never be on a single platform with no backups accessible elsewhere.
My three-point plan for this kind of incident is:
- Be ready before it happens
- Put Plan B into action
- Wait for it to be fixed
That way I'm not caught off-guard, I'm able to continue working (and deliver on deadline commitments) but I am also in a position to start using the relevant platform again as soon as it's restored.
Deadlines are stressful, no matter how prepared you are - so shout-out to anyone who was relying on Trello this afternoon, and will be working past 5pm to get finished as a result.
