French website surrenders on Bastille Day France's shiny new official website got off to a shaky start on Wednesday, promptly surrendering to the unwashed masses on its Bastille Day launch. The €1.6m portal fell over under the onslaught of too many visitors keen to explore the "major promotional tool of France's image abroad", the Telegraph explains, and it's still …
I am not yet fluent in french but from what I can make out, there would appear to be some discrepancy between the english and french error messages there... I know french is a "longer" language but i'm pretty sure it's not THAT much longer... What are they hiding?!
*insert predictable french jokes & burning cow here*
According to Google translate the french part says
The team regrets that France.fr enable you to find the gate of France. We are now facing a problem of configuration of our servers. We have undertaken an audit of all systems to allow us to reopen as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and see you soon!
What, including the chips and disks?
Bastille Day fell on a Wednesday, so I presume all the support staff will have 'bridged' the public holiday and will return to work on Monday. Let's hope there are no further problems in August, when the whole of France takes the month off.
Unless you've been in the support centre of a major French multinational undergoing a severe network outage and watched everyone depart 'because it's Friday 5pm', you really can't understand the French mindset.
Group A: the folk sitting in the pub at 5pm on Friday who have put work away until Monday
Group B: the ones still in the office at 10pm on Friday wrestling with a major production outage and watching their plans for the weekend slip down the toilet?
I've spent years in group B and I'm damn sure I'm not going back there again. It sounds to me like the French work to live, not the other way round. They probably look at some of our working practices and pity us....
Sounds good in principal, but if you are stuck in town, unable to by a drink or get a taxi because the ATM and card payment network is down and not going to be fixed until Monday, I think you may think differently.
What you are actually wanting is to pass the baton down to the next set of group B workers, and drop out.
Im not sure if its still the case (cant check due to company firewall) but it used to be that if you typed "French Military Victories" into google and clicked the "Try your luck" button, you got taken to a fake google page that said "No sites found. Did you mean French Military Defeats?"
Sorry but that anecdote just seemed appropriate for some reason!
in particular those by the historically well-informed commentators hiding behind signatures like «Iglethal» and «ViagraFalls» - who, alas, seem to have forgotten the heroic figure cut by the US «Operation Frequent Wind» on 30 April 1975 - have almost made me sympathise with William the Conqueror....
Henri
I doubt the website actually collapsed under the load from the French internet-viewing public. There is no French internet viewing public, because they're all too busy laying their hands on attractive members of their gender of choice and haughtily scarfing post-coital croissants.
The website got a connection from the area of Berlin and promptly decided to lay down and roll over.
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