Last week, several web services like Hootsuite, Livefyre, Quora, Foursquare and more crashed as Amazon Web Hosting’s EC2 servers took a nosedive off the diving board and into an empty swimming pool.

The technical issues that Amazon experienced meant you couldn’t access the services hosted by Amazon Web (or, if you could, with very limited features). Because of the amount of services using Amazon Web, the outage was a big one and affected users by almost a day.

As one of the services affected, social media management platform Hootsuite was out of action for around 15 hours. Not their fault, and not something that could have been foreseen.

However, Hootsuite felt they’d let customers down (they offer premium services, which we use at Bonsai, as well as the free platform). To that end, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes sent this email out:

Now, like I say, the outage and downtime wasn’t Hootsuite’s – but they treated it as if it was, and made good with their customers.

At Bonsai, we’re always looking at ways for our clients to build loyalty into everything they do – with customers, employees, stakeholders and more. Service and cost doesn’t quite hack it any more – everyone has great service and costs.

But loyalty and the user experience with you? That’s the gold right there – something Hoostuite gets in abundance.

Nice work, guys – you just made me an even bigger fan.

Originally published at The Human Side of Media and the Social Side of Marketing