Remember when Twitter went out for 40 minutes last July? Twitter was so contrite that it posted the following statement:

“The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centres. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time…We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.”

Glitches like this have consequences – many of which aren’t immediately obvious, and often aren’t public. Many are much more serious, because their business value is more intense for any one customer. I can think of four cautionary tales right off the bat.

1) Silent but deadly financial claw-backs

When one firm’s systems experienced serious performance degradation during the holiday season (at precisely the time when traffic was expected to peak), savvy customers took financial action behind closed doors.

“We did issue …