etsy

You may have noticed that the picture links over there at the side weren't working. That's because etsy was down. They wanted to do system maintenance, add a couple of servers, and fix up their network infrastructure. Etsy went down at 12:30am April 22 and was supposed to be up by 4:30am.

Etsy didn't go back up until 4:30pm, and the site is slower than it was in the first place. Apparently they ran into problems when they did their system upgrade - I know very well that this can happen. I am sort of wondering whether they had done adequate testing before they started this process. They said that a lot of things went wrong and they weren't prepared for that.... which leads me to believe that they weren't adequately prepared for the maintenance.

The site is still much, much slower than it was before the maintenance. I expect that they're going to have to take the site down again to fix some of the issues. I know that etsy is supposed to be this big community, but they've grown beyond what they could handle before, and I'm not at all convinced that they have the right training to handle a site as big as it is. They didn't even have a "we're doing maintenance" message up on the domain until 9am. Lack of a message like that strikes me as unprofessional. And while we might think that it's no big deal to have an error at 3am EDT, there are sellers and buyers from all over the world on that site.

I'm not a big seller on etsy - I've sold a few items, thanks to the support of my friends and family (and I appreciate each one of your support), but if I was, I expect I'd be even more annoyed with etsy. Their site was down for the better part of today and it's still not working; buyers won't necessarily understand. I like the community feel of etsy and the fact that it's pretty cheap to list my stuff.... but I don't like the technical problems they're having.