The perils of quick tweeting

We’re making a determined effort to post Twitter status updates very quickly if our monitoring systems detect any kind of problem.

Earlier, we tweeted “We’re investigating a possible outage on the mail.tigertech.net server” because one of the multiple external monitoring systems we use alerted us that it was unable to connect to our mail server cluster.

Upon investigation, it turns out to have just been a false alarm. There was a problem with the monitoring system; there was nothing wrong with the mail servers at all. Unfortunately, there’s probably no way to prevent occasional false alarms like this; we’d rather get the information out quickly, and by definition that means posting preliminary information before we’ve had a chance to fully investigate what’s happening.