I've written about how Google Fiber has slowly been rolling out here across the Kansas City metro area, including here at my place. The service has largely been excellent so far, and it seems to have built a solid reputation among its customers. But then the other night happened.
The Royals were playing in Game 1 of the World Series, and early in the game, Google Fiber was hit with a major outage across the metro. It didn't affect me since I was out watching the game elsewhere—and I don't have the TV portion of the service anyhow—but apparently a majority of KC metro area customers were affected.
Realize this is a city where 78% of the TV sets were tuned in to the game. The outage could not have come at a worse possible time. According to the KC Star, most customers were back online in about 40 minutes, while some were down for more than three hours. The only saving grace for those folks who were down the longest? There was still something like two hours left in the ballgame after that.
Google Fiber blamed the outage on a problem with an authentication server, the Star says.
You can imagine that this little episode would be a stain on the service's reputation. Google Fiber responded by sending out the following e-mail message, which I received, apparently along with all other KC-area customers.
So they're crediting every customer in the area with two days' worth of service. I'd prefer, you know, not to have an outage at such a critical time, but I do appreciate seeing an acknowledgement that problems of this sort—especially with this timing—are not OK.
Also: go Royals!