"Our service is down..."

No one wants to receive this message.

For two hours yesterday Basecamp, the online project management site we at Burris (and our clients) rely on, was "down." As in, not accessible.

Amazingly, no one panicked, and one of the key reasons was because all requested web page were sent to a message board that Basecamp's parent company, 37 Signals, updated about every ten minutes.

We work in Basecamp all day, using it almost as though it were a desktop rather than a web-based application. But for the client or vendor of ours who goes there only sporadically, 37 Signals' ongoing updates told the story, up-to-date, and kept those calls of "What the ___?" from coming to us.

The updates also told us they were working on the problem. And when service is down, that's the best comfort of all.