My long time friend Ben Neumann has a detailed post up titled Network Outage.  Ben is CEO / owner of Globat, a successful web hosting company.  I met Ben through an acquisition in the late1990′s when Interliant bought his previous company Icom (also a web hosting company.)

Ben’s company had a tough day yesterday.  Multi-hour critical failure is a way of life in any rapidly growing SaaS / hosting / web business.  It’s nice to fantasize that it will never happen, but virtually every high growth company has "its moment of fun."  It’s all in how you deal with it, how you treat and communicate with your customers, and what you learn from it. 

Part of dealing with it is being open about what happened and what you are doing about it going forward.  Ben does a nice job of setting an example here of how to do it.

On top of the outage, it was Ben’s wife Andrea’s birthday. Andrea – I hope you gave Ben a raincheck and decided to celebrate your birthday this weekend!  Ben – hint – flowers, chocolate, jewelry, and a trip to Hawaii.

Mitchell Ashley has an excellent post up titled Fail Early, Fail Often.  I’m seeing a little more chatter about failure, introspection about how it feels, and suggestions about how to turn it into a positive (or at least effective) experience making the rounds.

As someone who has experienced a lot of success and failure, I’m glad to see more people talking about failure in the blogosphere.  It’s a key part of the entrepreneurial experience.  It’s also an integral part of life that cannot be denied.  While it’s a lot more fun to succeed, it’s important to understand how to deal with failure.

My partner Seth Levine has a cathartic post up titled Failure where he describes failure from a VC’s point of view.

My friend Dave sent me a hysterical Onion article titled Failure Now An Option.  I hate the phrase "failure is not an option" – of course it is.  Some choice quotes:

• "As failure continues to dominate the American landscape, this mantra must be overruled"
• "We have no choice but to revoke failure’s non-optional status, effective immediately,"
• "Now all citizens … will [be able to say] Fuck that – this isn’t worth it."
• "The only difference is that now Americans can choose, without fear of being ostracized by society, to quit long before getting ahead."

And some data.

"Other data seem to confirm the Interior Department’s findings. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll revealed that 64 percent of Americans are "perfectly comfortable" with coming up just short, 43 percent are content to try only once rather than try, try again, and an overwhelming 95 percent admitted that after falling down, they now prefer to stay down.  Only 4 percent indicated having "some interest" in applying their balls to the wall."

While this is typical Onion satire, the brilliance of it is its underlying relevance.

It’s always useful to put failure in perspective.  While Citigroup is likely to announce a $20 billion writedown tomorrow, that’s difficult for most of us to relate to.

However, I bet most people that have traveled in the US have had the privilege of having their bags misplaced on a trip through Denver International Airport. 

The original amazing DIA baggage system cost $300m.  It never worked.  The city eventually turned it over to United Airlines (the dominant carrier at DIA.)  United Airlines stopped using it in 2005.  It’ll now cost $9m to dismantle it and get rid of the scrap metal.

Oops.