Email Downtime More Stressful Than Divorce

from the get-a-grip,-people dept

A new study suggests just how dependent business people have become on email. In the US, twenty percent of people immediately get angry if their email doesn't work. However, the calm ones don't stay that way very long if things don't come back. After five minutes downtime, another 13% have switched over to the angry side of the fence. By the half hour point, two-thirds of users are furious, and by the one hour mark, a full 82% of email-less business users are ready to burn down their cubicles. Folks over in the UK are a little bit calmer early on, but after an hour, their true colors come through, and they're just as angry as those of us on this side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, if you think the users have stress problems, think about the IT staff that is charged with keeping all those users happy. Many find it incredibly stressful to keep all those workers from revolting. 20% expect to be fired if they were to ever let downtime reach a full day. A full 37% say that if they ever experienced a week's downtime, it would be more stressful than going through a divorce.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Paul Duffield, 4 Apr 2006 @ 10:16am

    Email downtime

    This is so very true.

    The thing that amazes me too is that even though we bust a gut in support to fix these issues which are often/normally no fault of ours "they" non IT staff still want to shoot the messenger!

    By comparisson to many IT jobs other staff jobs are generally relatively simple and straightforward. I think we should triple our fees for people if they want to do business and put us under unjustified personal pressure.

    Anyone reading this not in IT spare a thought for the guys working through the night on extremely complex issues and difficult issues at times to keep the business going as best they can!

    Budgets from company to company vary considerably and everyone wants 99.99 % uptime but faint when you give them the bill for additional servers or out of hours support.

    It's a trade off of course but generally almost without exception every IT support person I know will do considerable extra overtime and make considerable efforts to keep people working in times of crisis.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Ed Palmer, 27 Oct 2008 @ 10:55am

    Email Recovery

    This is what Microsoft said about Mailretriever.net!

    "MailRetriever helps restore sanity to the chaotic and stressful daily life of Exchange administrators and network engineers. By delivering an easy-to-use application that delivers needed message-level recovery capabilities, MailRetriever is a great compliment to the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager solution for protecting and recovering Microsoft Exchange Server. If your business requires restoring lost and deleted messages, Microsoft suggests enhancing your DPM solution with MailRetriever."
    -Marc Kamstrup-Braad
    Senior Product Manager Microsoft DPM

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.