29 August 2019

By Göran R Buckhorn

Did you try to access FISA, World Rowing’s website in the beginning of the week and had problems doing so? You were not alone. We were many who tried to find the results and news from the World Rowing Championships in Linz-Ottensheim, Austria.

In a message yesterday, FISA wrote:

We, World Rowing, would first like to apologise for the issues that have been occurring on our website over the past two days. Below is an extract from a message we have received from the CEO of Delta Tre, our website provider, in which he explains why we have suffered these outages:

“I would like to apologise for the outages suffered on worldrowing.com due to the hosting maintenance performed during the evening of 26th August. Whilst the maintenance performed was successful and the site was operational throughout, we clearly suffered several issues with the functionality to upload content and provide the live data. I am fully aware of the significance of this to you and your fans, during your premier event of the year, as the day’s rowing could not be covered in the usual way on the website. The project team will of course provide a full debrief of the issues and root cause once all of the information is available. Once again, please accept my apologies for the issues caused.”
Giampiero Rinaudo, CEO, Delta Tre

These apologises immediately got response from some rowing media personalities.

Daniel Spring, ‘fatsculler’, tweeted: ‘Raises the question of whether the maintenance was planned or emergency. If planned, then what bright spark thought that was a good idea in the middle of the biggest event of the year!!!

Rowing Voice’s Rachel Quarrell tweeted a hashtag, saying ‘#refund’, while Christopher Anton, British FISA umpire, added on the critique by writing: ‘Delta Tre – there’s a name not to remember when looking for a web hosting company.’

Fingers crossed that from now on there will not be any issues.

Now over to the championships… Below commentators Martin Cross and Greg Searle give their thoughts of today’s races: