With the July 25, 2017 unexpected Marketo outage, many marketers are left asking the question, “what’s next?” At RevEngine Marketing, we are actively working with our clients on the issue and wanted to share a few of our recommendations for Marketo users, post outage. We’ve also included some links to other helpful resources.
NOTE: Bookmark this page for reference. As more information becomes available, we will update. All information is subject to change.
Last update: 2:27 PM July 28, 2017.
Marketo Outage Timeline/Updates (ET)
7/28/2017 – 2:27 PM – Issues have pretty much crawled to a halt from what have been seeing. If you have any remnant issues, please contact Marketo Support.
7/27/2017 – 4:15 PM – More and more companies seem to be getting back online. Over the past 4 hours, there hasn’t been a mention of non access on Marketo which is a good sign.
Seems to be working for me now, thanks.
— alexkayash (@alexkayash) July 27, 2017
7/27/2017 – 2:20 PM – The story continues to take a twist. Marketo donates 10K to a charity chosen by Travis Prebble, the good samaritan who purchased the expired marketo.com domain to ensure it didn’t fall in the wrong hands. Project Pinball donates time and pinball machines to children’s hospitals to help make hospital stays a little more fun.
Okay, it’s official! As a show of gratitude, @Marketo is donating $10K to @ProjectPinball ! Many MANY thanks to @nstevenlucas for this!
— Travis Prebble (@TravisPrebble) July 27, 2017
7/27/2017 – 9:05 AM – From what we are seeing via Twitter, issues with DNS propagation are decreasing. However, some customers are still experiencing issues.
@marketocares @marketo Hey, I understand that a DNS issue takes time to get completely sorted…. but this is the second day!!! pic.twitter.com/uEH3t7FR4U
— diegolineros (@diegolineros) July 27, 2017
7/26/2017 – 10:45 pm – Updates made to Mike Reynolds FAQ on Marketo.com.
7/26/2017 – 7:01 PM – New articles/posts added to the Resources section at the bottom of this post. If you have any good resources, email us.
7/26/2017 – 4:55 PM – Love to see Marketo CEO Steve Lucas stepping up for those still having issues.
Mid-day update #3 If anyone is still having an issue with access, send me an email directly. ceo@marketo.com – the team is monitoring.
— Steve Lucas (@nstevenlucas) July 26, 2017
7/26/2017 – 1:47 PM – DNS takes time so some customers are still waiting. If you are still having issues, try flushing your local DNS as several Marketo customers have had success with that. Otherwise, you’ll need to wait.
RT marketo: ana_neum Hi Ana, we’ve remediated the domain issue. However, DNS propagation can take longer in some l… https://t.co/i35pYvJDb5
— Beth Chiasson (@BethChiasson) July 26, 2017
DNS flush may not work-that flushes your local cache. Issue is from regional DNS cached version they’re serving
— Marketo Cares (@MarketoCares) July 26, 2017
7/26/2017 – 12:31 PM – Not sure why Marketo didn’t tweet this yesterday, but they just Tweeted a FAQ from Mike Reynolds.
Get answers to the most frequently asked questions regarding the recent https://t.co/27ZusrmaXN domain access issue: https://t.co/6p6w3Zruhm
— Marketo (@marketo) July 26, 2017
7/26/2017 – 12:12 PM – Some Marketo customers are still having issues with access.
“When @marketo went offline…” @marketo is still offline for a number of people, including me. @marketocares ?
— design frugal (@designfrugal) July 26, 2017
@marketo When will this nightmare be over? I still can’t access our instance from Canada, working fine for our US team. Deadlines at risk!
— Aemkei. (@annariak) July 26, 2017
7/26/2017 – 10:04 AM – Not sure if it’s geography related but RevEngine Marketing US-based clients have access to their instances. For a few that were having access issues, it was due to a cached DNS/browser. Here’s how you flush it according to Google…….DNS Flush.
Still affected from the #marketo outage? Update your DNS to Google DNS (working on all pods I’ve tested): https://t.co/goFz0xfPTC
— Courtney Grimes (@cougrimes) July 25, 2017
@marketo @alexkayash 3 DNS flushes later and I’m back in. pic.twitter.com/hXJVsru933
— Sarah O’Brien (@sarahinhell) July 26, 2017
7/26/2017 – 1:02 AM – Marketo CEO Steve Lucas sends email (PDF) to Marketo customers and partners confirming human and process errors around the renewal of the Marketo.com domain which led to the July 25th outage.
7/25/2017 – Marketo has resolved the issue but it will take some time for the DNS to propagate across the internet
We’ve remediated the issue, but are waiting on DNS servers to recognize the changes. We expect most customers to have access soon.
— Marketo (@marketo) July 25, 2017
7/25/2017 – Marketo acknowledges issue and has come up with an initial timeline.
We apologize for the access issues on https://t.co/27Zusr4A6f. It has been fixed and we expect access to be restored no later than noon PDT.
— Marketo (@marketo) July 25, 2017
7/25/2017 – Marketo customers can not access Marketo.com or their Marketo instances.
1. How Was I Affected By the Marketo Outage?
If you use Marketo, you were affected by the 7/25/2017 outage. This outage stem from a domain issue with marketo.com and rendered all Marketo pods inaccessible. Along with the accessibility issues of Marketo instances, there were other aspects of functionality affected as well.
Although the scope of the outage and its effects are not fully known, here are the areas that have been affected:
- Email Links
- Marketo Forms
- Subdomains (For some instances)
- Marketo hosted Images not rendering
- Email open tracking (Inferred by image issue)
Other Things to Consider – Maybe
Some other aspects of Marketo functionality may also have been affected. The extent of the outage’s impact is currently unknown, but some areas worth monitoring are:
- Triggered smart campaign functionality
- CRM sync issues
- 3rd party integration errors
- Email deliverability
2. Communicate Internal Expectations
In situations like this, it’s important to communicate with key stakeholders internally; level expectations on what has been affected and what will need to be done to restore functionality. As we’re writing this, there are still many unknowns. Even so, it’s important to communicate that to your colleagues to ensure transparency and preserve trust.
3. Email Follow Up – Apologizing Where Needed
Customers and prospects who received emails or attempted to fill out forms on your website have also been affected by today’s outage and it’s important to communicate with them. The caveat here: you should avoid over-communicating to customers that have not been affected by the outage. Since your forms aren’t working during the outage, some companies have turned to Twitter to reached out to their customers via Twitter.
Can’t fill out forms on our site? We’re a part of the @marketo outage. Email us at marketing@pfl.com with your questions. #MarketoOut
— PFL (@PFLcom) July 25, 2017
The #Marketo is outage is affecting demos & downloads on our site. Please email sales[at]unionmetrics[dot]com & we’ll get back to you ASAP!
— Union Metrics (@UnionMetrics) July 26, 2017
If you deployed an email today (deliberately or inadvertently) we recommend sending a follow-up communication to the recipients of that email, confirming the issues they experienced and expressing your apologies for the inconvenience. As mentioned before, it’s important to limit these communications to that customer you know were affected.
Another area that may have been affected are customers or prospects that should have received trigger based email communications. It has not yet been confirmed whether or not these communications remained functional during the outage, but it is important to review this area and follow up where needed.
4. Marketo Outage Checklist
We’ve put together a brief checklist of items that should be re-verified, once Marketo comes back online. It’s important to ensure that all functionality is truly restored, avoiding any ongoing impact to your business:
- Landing Page & Links Subdomain: Verify that your pages’ subdomain is functioning. In some cases, there may be a DNS cache or propagation delay that will affect the accessibility of this domain. If you are still unable to access this domain in 12 hours, contact Marketo support.
- Email Links: We have reason to believe that the functionality of links will be restored once the integration comes back online, however, it is worth verifying this be clicking through any Marketo emails you have lying around in your inbox.
- DKIM and SPF Authentication: These items should be unaffected by the Marketo outage, however, it’s important to re-verify both methods of authentication, to ensure there are no lingering issues.
- CRM Sync: There’s a good chance your CRM sync has experienced almost as rough of a day as you have. For this reason, it’s important to monitor your Marketo notifications for Sync errors. Stay in close contact with you CRM admin and spot check your database for errors or inconsistencies, particularly if the bulk of the outage occurred during business hours in your time zone.
- Mailability Concerns: There’s a chance that emails deployed during the outage may have experienced an artificially high bounce rate. For this reason, we recommend analyzing any bounces you recorded during the outage and exploring whether or not to unsuppress hard bounced records that may have bounced due to marketo.com domain issues.
- Monitor Lifecycle, Nurture and Trigger Campaigns: There’s a possibility that there may have been issues with the triggers or batches of these campaigns, particularly if these trigger off data from other systems, like your webinar, events, or video platforms, or CRM data. It’s important to check these campaigns and processes to ensure that there were no gaps in processing, and to correct those as soon as possible.
- Verify all third-party credentials: Make sure your logins & API connections to all your third party platforms are functioning correctly. Restore any faulty logins to make sure your data stays flowing. Test by registering for a webinar, watching a video, or clicking a social media ad link to verify.
Note: The above recommendations are subject to change as more information becomes known.
Further Marketo Outage Resources
How To
- How to Flush Your DNS (Google)
Marketo Communications
- CEO Steve Lucas 7/26 email (PDF)
- Marketo.com Domain (DNS) Access Issue (P1 July 25, 2017) Mike Reynolds
General
- What Happened When Marketo’s Domain Name Expired? (Young Xu, Thousand Eyes)
- Is “Right Message, Right Person, Right Time” the Wrong Message to Content Marketers? (Sean Schroeder, mura)
- How Not To Respond to Marketo’s Fail, Starring Act-on (Amber Picotte, Curata)
- Marketo’s Brand Equity Despite The Ultimate Meltdown (Dayna Rothman, BrightFunnel)
- The Marketo Mess That Could Have Been Avoided (Risk IQ)
- When Marketo went offline, self-described ‘geek’ rescued domain after their own failure to renew (Barry Levine, Marketing Land)
- How One Fan Made Marketo’s Bad Day a Little Less So (Mack Collier)
- [Breaking News] Funniest Tweets in the Wake of Marketo Outage (Ryan Alleman, Jive)
A collaborative post by RevEngine’s Tyson Jurgens and Tim Cerato.
The post Marketo Outage Have You Down? Checkout These Post Outage Tips appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.
