It’s time again for another Round the Office Roundup! This series will give you a sneak peek into the world of what’s going on at Digital Pacific.
Before we begin – just a reminder to Instagram users to make sure to follow us @digitalpacificwebhosting!
So, what’s been happening?
We were very excited recently to be able to announce the winner of the Apple iPhone 7. The lucky Customer Service Survey entry was submitted by Daniela of Tonika Health in Sydney. We later learned that her win comes just in time for her birthday too! In the coming weeks we’ll be making the pilgrimage to visit Daniela at her clinic and present her with her shiny new thing. Pics to come!
More spectacular even than a brand new iPhone 7 was the fact that we managed to wrangle the entire herd into a civilised celebratory photo, all while spelling Daniela’s name correctly!
I have to admit… the only reason we got this photo to happen was by arranging to take it immediately prior to the arrival of the Friday team lunch. With the ominous threat of starvation in play, everyone was on their best pretty-good behavior. Lunch of hand-crafted schnitzels arrived shortly after, fresh from the kitchen of Markt.
In tech news, the next major cPanel update version 60 has been pushed out to our Shared hosting fleet. This iteration of cPanel brings with it the deprecation of the X3 theme we’re all so used to seeing, instead replacing it with the newer, flatter Paper Lantern theme. More information on this change and what it means for you can be found here.
Last week, party-sized buckets of M&M’s started manifesting all over the office. It was later revealed that the snack fairy had unwittingly put them on sale in the snack bar, with no way of foreseeing the desperate consequences.
As it turns out, Tech Support Rep Gavin had swooped in and bought the lot before dispersing them all around the office. And so it was that for the next 48 solid hours, the primary source of sustenance for the Digital Pacific crew came out of buckets. 4.26 kilograms later and somehow everyone has lived to the tale.
Alright, we have to talk about it.
Gluttony and iPhones aside, at around 2am on Thursday, a sleepy on-call SysAdmin logged on to check an alert that had come through regarding a system error. He quickly identified that this was going to be something big and woke up our Level 4 engineers. Shortly thereafter, it was all hands on deck as it became apparent that a large portion of our shared hosting network was suffering an outage.
Later that morning, our support crew really came together and went above and beyond to handle the enormous amount of calls and tickets coming in. Upon hearing about the trouble, many people came in on their days off, and almost every single person volunteered to work overtime that day to lessen the strain. It was a true show of camaraderie and despite the outage itself being a real hit to us and our customers, it was nice to see everyone come together to get things back online as quickly as possible.
In the afternoon, a tower of pizzas (aka comfort food) arrived to feed the hungry troops, some of whom had been working tirelessly since the very early hours of that morning. Later that evening, we changed things up a bit and shared a meal of Thai between the many who stayed behind. Work continued through much of the night and finally on Friday, the storm began to settle as each server was meticulously restored back to a normal state.
To all of our customers, we offer a heartfelt apology. We hate letting you down and will do everything we can to learn from this experience and ensure we never see a repeat.
A special thank you goes out to those customers who showed us patience and understanding throughout the event. There were quite a few of you who sent us words of encouragement on our social media channels and email – and we truly appreciated each and every one of them!
That’s it for this week’s roundup. Wishing you all a great weekend!
