I ran into the Google Docs downtime yesterday trying to edit a spreadsheet. Opening the document resulted in this error message:
For a few seconds this caused some serious tension. Did Google really remove my entire speadsheet? Despite the error message claiming that the file I had been editing for weeks didn’t exist, I quickly switched gears, suspecting that something was wrong with the service and not my file. The Google status page confirmed my suspicions.
This got me thinking about how services convey failure messages. In the broad sense there are at least two types of failure messages a service needs to provide. The first is some sort of user error, which is the one Google provided me yesterday. The second is a general ‘hey, we are down right now’ message.
My initial confusion and concern during the Google Docs downtime came from Google mixing up these two types of messages. The provided me with the first type ( user error ), when really it was the second type ( system is down ).