May 22nd, 2007 
admin 
XM Radio (NASDAQ:XMSR) is walking through a merger with Sirius Radio(NASDAQ:SIRI). And, if you have ever gone through a merger, there are always issues – always. There’s just too many things that you can’t know before walking down that path. Well, during a software upgrade to XM’s satellite broadcast system, something went awry. So, one of their satellites became an orbiting piece of space garbage. And that left some listeners without their tunes, and stinkin angry about it.
This outage left an undisclosed amount of their customers without the signal on Monday. And, it seems on last check that they are still frantically working on a resolution. Reboot – reboot! I can’t imagine the stress involved in that tech support case. XM posted this on their website:
“As many of you know, XM customers have experienced service outages or significantly degraded service since Monday mid-morning, May 21.
We quickly identified the problem and are working hard to return to our normal levels of service. The problem occurred during the loading of software to a critical component of our satellite broadcast system, which resulted in a loss of signal from one of our satellites. We expect normal service to resume midday today (eastern daylight time).”
Until service is restored, XM recommends you go to their website to enjoy the signal. I hope you have internet in your vehicle!
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With the XM Satellite service outage dominating headlines so soon after the Blackberry outage, it’s worth again looking at what these outages have in common, which is why organizations can’t diagnose such problems and prevent them happening. In this case, XM says they have “quickly identified the problem,” a software glitch, but the damage to reputation and customer service is done..
Like the Blackberry outage, this validates the need for companies to be able to predict potential outages before they occur and before users are impacted. It’s not enough anymore to wait for expensive monitoring tools to pick up problems after they’ve already wreaked havoc on the system. If organizations continue to take this approach, you can be sure we haven’t seen the last of these damaging outages. Instead companies need to think proactively and gain insight into the behavior of their IT infrastructure to learn what is normal that way when abnormalities are detected, problems can be identified and prevented before anyone is affected. My company, Integrien, is in the business of helping companies achieve this.