(Originally posted on ReadWriteWeb)

This one’s for the engineers, the programmers, the database administrators, the sysadmins, the networking gurus, and the rest of that army of people that gets deployed when a major outage happens.

While the rest of us grouse that we can’t check in at our local haunts, or log on with our Twitter app of choice, or vote a story up or down on Reddit – or even do something a little more directly tied to social or economic productivity – those folks are working brutal hours under intense pressure to get everything back up again.

And while we’re firing off #fail hashtags and loudly musing about how we’re seriously considering competitors and alternatives, they’re closing off issues, squashing bugs, rooting out corrupted files or finding that one fried capacitor that brought everything down.

Yes, someone or some group of people out there was responsible for the decisions or actions – or lack thereof – that led to the latest outage, and they should be held accountable. But every once in a while, it’s nice to shift the recrimination generators into idle, and thank the people who get us all back up and running again.

(And while we’re at it, say a nice word or two to the folks whose web apps are affected by those outages, and who keep fielding the “Why the hell isn’t MyFavoriteTrendyOnlineService.com running?” calls from people who think cloud computing is how the weather service gives such accurate forecasts.)