It’s not been a particularly great week in terms of ‘outages’. Earlier today I blogged about Twitter being offline for a couple of hours yesterday. However, this pales into comparative insignificance when viewed in contrast to the current situation being faced by customers of a major bank in the UK.
Since Tuesday, NatWest has had technical problems which have left millions of account holders unable to access money and delayed salary payments to employees whose companies use the bank. This ‘technical glitch’ continues as I write this blog at 16:54pm on Friday, with NatWest saying that they might not have it fixed until Monday. Well, it’s just as well that I’m not counting on them to deliver my salary into my account before I go on holiday next week. Oh wait, yes I am… Cripes.
Anyway, why is this relevant on the SocialSafe blog? Well, while it’s hard to argue that an inability to withdraw cash from your bank account or defaulting on a Direct Debit are the same as not being able to access Twitter, the situations are more similar than you’d think:
People know they have money in their accounts, but they cannot access it. Likewise, people know that they have a wealth of content stored in the tweets they’ve posted, been mentioned in, and the DMs they have exchanged, yet they cannot access it.
Thankfully with the Twitter outage there is still a way to access this content in such circumstances. By backing up your Twitter account (and for that matter, Facebook, Instagram, Viadeo, Google+ and LinkedIn) with SocialSafe, all of your content is stored on your own computer in a searchable offline journal. So if the worst happens and you are separated from the original source, at least your own content that you’ve created isn’t out of reach while someone else tries to fix whatever it is that went wrong. Apologies from the SocialSafe Team that we can’t work the same magic with your NatWest account.
To create your own SocialSafe journal today, visit our website or head to our Facebook Page where you can claim a free version to get started.
Yesterday, while I was at work, my cousin stole my iPad and tested to see if it can survive a forty
foot drop, just so she can be a youtube sensation.
My apple ipad is now destroyed and she has 83 views.
I know this is completely off topic but I had to share it with
someone!