I work for one of the largest US federal agencies. All of my work takes place within our case management system. I cannot do or communicate anything about an assignment other than within our CMS. Basically, at the start of the day I open CMS and Outlook (for email) first thing, work in those all day, and close them last thing at the end of the day.
This morning, I tried to sign into CMS at 6:15 central and got a message that it was in “maintenance mode.” I tried a restart, but got the same. Sent an email to management and IT, and was informed that there was some systems issue and - yes - CMS was down. But it said systems had been aware of this since 5:30 ET! By now 3 hours have passed and there has been no general email to all users - from national, regional, or our local office - that NO ONE can do ANY work.
Just wondering if there is any explanation of why this isn’t completely fucked up? How bad does something have to be to take 3+ hours to fix (let alone communicate about)? This is by no means an isolated occurrence. I know I often come off as technophobic, but having to deal with this quite regularly at work colors my attitude towards much of computers and technology. I don’t hate or fear technology. I just desire it to reliably do the limited things I ask of it when I wish.
I think I’ll go for a nice long bike ride…
No idea. But if something’s really wrong, my company’s IT will post a bannder on the support site. So if I decide to open a ticket about it, theoretically I should already see that there’s a problem.
They don’t send out company-wide emails for such things.
What Dinsdale is describing would be very frustrating, but no, I’ve never encountered it.
My workplace does send out emails for these things, to every user. The emails cover every system issue, whether system-wide problems (eg - “Internet connection is down system-wide”), down to problems at a specific location: “App X is not working for people at 1234 Smith Street, Boondocks”.
I think they go on the principle that “if it affects you, you’ll want to know that we’re working on it. If it doesn’t affect you, you can delete this e-mail.”
They also send out regular updates on problems that they’re working on.
If it’s a major problem that affects me personally, I sometimes just have to read a book for a while until they fix it.
My son was working in an IT organization. The email system once went down for several hours, so no one in the company could send or receive email. He fielded an irate call from someone, and explained to her that the email system was not functional but they were working on it. She exclaimed, “when something like this happens, you should send out an email about it!”
It was back up when I returned 3 hours later. Never any explanation as to what the problem is, or when it was fixed.
Yeah - we’ve received the helpful “send an email” suggestions when email is down. 
I vaguely recall one time - maybe 20 years ago, when our system was down for several days. That was pretty crazy - and extreme.
The notice on the CMS simply said it was in maintenance mode. It didn’t say that was unintended. If it had simply said, “IT has been notified and is working on it,” I would not have needed to try to figure out what was going on. If management/IT are busy trying to fix it, I’d think the last thing they need is a bunch of folk notifying them and asking about the issue.
I won’t tell you about how many absolutely unnecessary emails I’ve gotten so far today, which I contrast with the lack of one that WOULD HAVE BEEN helpful.