How Airbnb scaled to 24/7 support (including phone) in 1 month | Hacker News Reader

How Airbnb scaled to 24/7 support (including phone) in 1 month

uservoice.com

49 pointsevanhamilton9 comments

> "Within one month, Airbnb had 24/7 support up and running. 8 months later, the system is running smoothly...."

Implied: there were some rocky bits in the intervening 7 months.

I'd love to hear about those! This certainly isn't a judgement on their success---scaling to 24/7 in a month is impressive even if there remained bugs to work out. (It's also not a judgement of the OP, which explained what it set out to explain, i.e. the initial one month.) So I guess, consider this a request for an interesting follow-up post. :)

I wasn't necessarily trying to imply that, though I'm sure it is true. :)

Based on what they told me, it sounds like the scheduling was the hardest part. Second hardest was probably finding the right phone system that worked perfectly for them.

If you have any specific questions, I recommend you tweet http://twitter.com/jessemaan directly...I'm sure she'd be happy to answer if she can!

Would love some more technical details, in particular about the "fancy" phone system. I was expecting some useful information based on the title.

Sorry about that, I guess I was more interested in the process! :) You should ping http://twitter.com/jessemaan about the system...I'm sure she'd be happy to share.

I wish Heroku would do this :)

I wish Google would do this.

I wish there wasn't a need for this.

If offering support was in any way required for Google's business model, they would consider it.

As it's not it would only be a waste of time as people calling as Google "customers" would ask about their search difficulties or Gmail formatting concerns.

Heroku support is surprisingly awesome and helpful. Their support engineers are as competent as other companies' development engineers, in my experience. Also, they get back to you really quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com