How Badly the Marketo Outage Affected You & What to Do in the Aftermath?

Last week, a Marketo outage took the marketing world by storm, as the main website, Maraketo.com and its other domains, went down, causing many hours of outage. Companies, marketers and their clients were left aghast with this sudden outage incident as they were unable to log in or access any information from the Marketo website.

Users and website visitors flooded with queries and questions on the best things to do to cope up with the commotion – at that, Marketo and its CEO Steve Lucas addressed and acknowledged the mishap by tweeting their cause and apologies:

“I want to sincerely apologize to you and on behalf of the entire Marketo team as we take any disruption to your service very seriously.”

However, their tweets could do little to relieve the agitation and apprehension of users worldwide.

What caused Marketo outage?

Steve Lucas, the CEO of Marketo, identified the root cause that resulted in the Marketo outage problem as “an auto renewal error”. He explained that the practice of renewing their thousands of domain properties every year is successfully executed through an auto renewal process which failed miserably this time. The auto renewal failure became a reality through a series of “human and process errors”.

The entire Marketo system seems to be up and running again normally. The present status of the outage problem can be followed from Marketo Status site: http://marketo.statuspage.io/

So, the question is exactly, how badly were your Marketo campaigns affected by this outage problem? And what things must you do as well, now that the service has been restored?

How did Marketo outage disturb your marketing process?

In addition to leaving users with inaccessibility to the official website, a large number of functionalities were potentially disturbed including –

• Emails – links in emails were deterred as well as the issue also hindered monitoring email open performance.

• Also, errors with delivery of Marketo emails

• Forms in Marketo

• Marketo Subdomains were not accessible

• Issues related to Marketo-hosted Images

• Third-party software integration issues

• Smart campaign functionalities

• Errors with integrating with Marketo supported CRM platforms

To address these potential issues hampered by Marketo outage, we have mapped the following activities essential to avoid disturbances caused to your business –

1. Check with your browser – get a copy of the site on the browser you use for accessing the site (by pressing CMD+R on Mac and CMD+R on Windows). Also, consider cleaning the history including password, forms, cache and other elements to enable your browser to reset the cookie and site settings.

2. Troubleshoot DNS problem – in order to avoid the risk of the Domain Name Service (DNS) returning an incorrect IP address for Marketo.com, you need to do this. First, clean the DNS cache (whether Windows or Mac) and also, by rebooting the router to clear the DNS cache saved on your router. You simply need to turn off the router, remove all the plugs from the device, and switch off the power. Wait a while, then re- connect all the plugs and switch on the device.

3. DNS service and hijacking – If you still are unable to access the Marketo.com site, then you need to check if there are any risks of DNS hijacking which hijack site traffic to users to the malware-laden intended ISP hackers want. Also, you will need to check your site traffic, in order to check for transparent proxies which may intercept the site traffic and send to a different site which the ISP considers more accurate. You also need to ensure that you are using a VPN or a smart DNS service, and that they are running in good condition.

4. CRM integration – once you are able to access the Marketo site and its functionalities, check if the CRM integration is experiencing any issue. To check CRM sync errors, you need to check to see if there are any Marketo notifications regarding sync issues. Consult with your CRM admin to check any inconsistency or issue noted while outage in your country.

5. Check all the links – next, you need to verify all the links including those of landing pages, links of sub-domains of your Marketo pages, and also check with links in your email by clicking on Marketo emails from the inbox.

6. Lifecycle of campaigns – additionally, you need to check if any errors were caused to the campaigns or triggers during Marketo outage. Especially of those triggers and batches are for any webinar or other events, CRM data or video software. Also, check and verify if there are any gap in Marketo processes and campaigns.

7. Emails – you need to monitor those emails that were deployed during those hours that Marketo was down. Chances are those emails will suffer from high bounce rates. Look for hard bounced data that may have resulted from bounced mails during Marketo downtime.

8. Third-party login – another significant area which might be affected by Marketo outage and that you need to check is the set of all login credentials when Marketo site is up and running. To verify a seamless third-party login, you can register for any content downloads, webinar, hit any social media ad etc.

In addition to the items listed above, you will also need to check for authentication DKIM and SPF and make sure there are no issues with these two areas caused by the Marketo outage problem.

Do you need technical assistance on verifying and fixing any issues with Marketo campaigns and restore to the optimum campaign results post-outage then, share your issues with our Marketo Certified Professionals by calling (408) 502 6765. Or connect with us via your preferred social channels Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.