Seoulscapade

I signed up for Zoho this week with great enthusiasm after seeing what it offered, but that enthusiasm, and trust along with it, was soon shattered.

Zoho is a free online suite of various tools, some much like those Google offers—the excellent Google Docs, for example. But Zoho has so much more. I was very impressed by the ability to create online database applications. I was impressed with the look of everything, by the stylish appearance compared with the somewhat bland Google. In Zoho you see the future of web apps and where computing is going in the next decade.

I started experimenting, storing files, looking around. Before too long, I started to notice some glitches. Sometimes it was unresponsive. Then suddenly, 3 mysterious documents appeared in my document list, the names of which I forget. Temporary names, it seemed. These documents were 523 days old! Nothing to do with me, although they did have my name as their creator. I deleted them and some messages said they didn’t exist, or something like that. Anyway, these ones did in fact disappear. Well, that’s a relief.

Not only this, I had 4 of my files in a folder. I deleted them and they disappeared. However, after a refresh of the browser, the files were back again. This happen every single time I tried to delete them. Also, when they were being deleted a message would appear stating that the files did not exist, or something of the kind. I discovered that the files were listed in the Trash. Once I deleted them from the trash, the problem went away.

None of this compares with what happened next, the day before yesterday in the morning when I checked out my document list again. There, in the list, was a document belonging to a complete stranger.

I’ll let the ramifications of that sink in.

It was someone’s private notes on their love of rap music, how rap was their life. I couldn’t believe it—I mean the fact that it was there, not the fact that this person can’t see that most of rap is crap.

Alarm bells went off: What if my files were appearing in someone else’s list half way around the world? I was annoyed as hell, and I bet the rap guy would have been too, if he had known I was reading his private thoughts. I’m sure a lot of people would be angry. I immediate fired of emails to Zoho support, then hit the Zoho forums to alert people.

Well, even the forums were buggy. The browser page kept reloading every 2 seconds; the image of confirmation numbers wouldn’t load properly, which you needed to post a topic; after every refresh I lost my post. Now, I was really started to get pissed off with Zoho. After trial and error, I managed to post the issue to “Writer Bugs” as a guest, which means the post would be moderated. I’ve checked back since, but no post. Maybe that went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go, too.

I next went to the Zoho blogs, to the one here about Zoho Writer, and as you can see, down the page, I commented on the issue and another of concern. That got a response some 3 hours later, but I only found out about that today. It seems they took action straight away, as the maintenance notice from here explains:

Update: As of 6:15 pm PST We have put in a fix & the services are now up. We are monitoring the logs closely, to see if the race condition below recurs. We will keep you updated of the status. Our development team is also doing an exhaustive review of the impacted parts of the code. If you encounter any errors accessing services, please post a comment here or in the forums. We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused, and we assure you of our vigilant effort to maintain a high level of service.

(Original post 5:35 pm PST) We encountered an unexpected error (a potential race condition) this evening in a part of the common software framework underlying our services, and as a matter of precaution, we have taken down Zoho services (except Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects, which are on a different framework), as we work to isolate the problem. This race condition seems to occur under heavy load (as they typically do), and the past couple of days, our load has been quite heavy, several times the normal load. We have sufficient hardware infrastructure to handle the load, but we detected some potential software race conditions from our logs. Multiple teams are working right now to isolate the issue. We will post an update here as soon as additional information is available.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We realize so many of you depend on Zoho services, and we take the responsibility you entrust with us seriously. We will bring up the service as soon as possible, likely within 3 hours (8:30 PM Nov 27, Pacific Standard Time i.e GMT – 8 hours).

The response I got also pointed to the forum where people where having some related problem of being logged into other users’ accounts. Scary, indeed.

Meanwhile, one of my emails had hit home. This morning I got a personal apology from Zoho’s CEO. Support had forwarded my email directly to him. He explained it as follows:

This was a very rare race condition in the software that was unearthed yesterday. We promptly stopped the service, and put an emergency hot-fix in yesterday. A total of 12 people were impacted, and I am sending a personal note of apology.

But I was still annoyed my forum post was still not there, so I decided to comment on a blog about Zoho. You can see that here. Then just over an hour later, I get a reply to my comment, as you can see in the blog. Someone at Zoho had perhaps been monitoring the blog. Here’s part of the reply comment:

We again apologize for this. We put a fix to the issue and are monitoring this very closely. This is an important issue and we are taking this seriously. We will keep you posted.

The guy request that I email him about the other bugs beside the major one, which I did. I also added these pertinent comments:

As for the major problem I had, where a strangers document appeared in my documents list, I am still astounded by it. And it scared me to think that my own documents could end up anywhere.

My thinking is that the functionality to ensure documents stay where they belong should be at the very heart of Zoho software. It is fundamental beyond anything else, and everything else should be build around it. Because if developers can’t guarantee that security–in a web app especially, they are out of business.

I have already read elsewhere people saying the Google is solid, whereas Zoho is buggy. That’s not a good reputation to have. I know it’s easy to criticize from a distance, and I don’t have to deal with complex computer code, but it really is common sense to get the core functionality right first, before anything else. And in such a tough market, it has to be 100% right, which means 100% tested before release.

I would like to see Zoho succeed, but I can’t commit to using it now because I’ve lost the trust. I will wait a while until it has undergone more development.

The reply to which, or part of it, was this:

Thank you for providing detailed description of the issues. We will look into this ASAP. We are taking this up as our highest priority.

We certainly understand that if we cannot get this functionality right, we will loose many users like you and hence we almost paused most of our other activity to focus on this one for the last 36 hours after this was reported. This is the first time such an issue occurred and I can assure you that we are absolutely focused on addressing it and we are closely monitoring our fix it to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We’ll try hard to earn your trust back.

Trust is indeed what it’s all about. I’ll return to it in a while, if I can see a need, and hopefully by then the bugs have been ironed out.

I’ve got to say that Zoho looks great, and I really hope they succeed. They’re trail blazers, breaking ground in web apps, which will be the big thing in the next decade, so one can’t be too critical. It’s hard not to be disappointed, though.