Microsoft celebrates its downtime

After experiencing downtime in its launch of Photosynth this past week, Microsoft admits it's projections were a little off:

"We have been abolsutely overwhlemed by demand, and have turned Photosynth.com into a special static/read-only mode for the moment. The team is hard at work adding capacity and getting the full site back online. We've been under incredible demand since we released just over 12 hours ago. With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.

Getting ready for the launch we did massive amounts of performance testing, built capacity model after capacity model, and yet with all of that, you threw so much traffic our way that we need to add more capacity. We are adding that extra horsepower right now and should be back up shortly.

Thank you for the incredible reception! "

Nice to see some visibility into their thinking up to launch, and the preparation they (unsuccessfully) went through. The next best thing to real time downtime status is a well formed explanation after launch (assuming the downtime is not prolonged), and something this personal coming out of Microsoft is a good sign.