== System status announcements and where your users are Commentators on my [[earlier entry SysadminTwitter]] brought up using Twitter for system status announcements and the like. I think that this makes sense for a lot of places, but I don't think it makes sense for us, and it has to do with where our users are; not in a geographical sense, but in a network and Internet sense. For many Internet companies, your users are outside, on the general Internet, trying to get 'in' to you, and so using a status reporting system that is outside on the general Internet makes sense; it is where your users already are. But for us, most of our users are inside trying to get out, so we need an inside status reporting system to tell them about things. We can have an outside status reporting system too; some of our users are outside (using VPNs and so on to get in), and other users may prefer to get status updates through the outside service when possible (they already use it for other things or they like the interface better, and most system issues will hopefully not interrupt the connection between inside and outside). But for us the inside system has to be the primary, because we need to be able to easily post to it when the link to outside isn't working. (And similarly, it may make sense for Internet companies to have an inside echo of their outside status feed, although I know less of those issues.)