The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp) website, in addition to being extremely dated in its design, keeps business hours for accessing things like ID registration or travel agency certificate renewals. At first I thought it was a joke as the message displays something like, "we want to respect a work life balance and therefore only offer online services from X to Y." But for real, you can't access the online services during US based business hours.
It is wrong in so many ways. First of all the site is determining when the appropriate business hours are for its users, not taking into consideration moonlighters or other night owls. And second, it's a service for travel agents!! who are supposedly traveling to other time zones.
I get it if the people behind a service need to set limits on when they are expected to handle requests, but that doesn't mean the service shouldn't be available all the time. Good messaging and setting expectations for when requests will be handled are a much better solution in my opinion.
There was a time when I had to goto the bank in person during business hours and interact with a teller. There was zero chance of getting hacked, the tellers knew me, and I had to live a more intentional life. Perhaps business hours for a website means real people are there actively monitoring its security and activity.
Since that is a airline-related website, and you wouldn't probably believe me, but is this a possible case of very old backend systems running in batch outside of office hours? This is such a serious issue that some legacy government websites, like UK's DVLA, to this day still has an operating hours (https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...)
I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time.
During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes.
I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.
And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect.
I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one.
If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones.
Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
> Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
That's way too big of a risk, and way too much stress to put on your customers.
For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week. 2% of the year.
In general, big release dates or important deadline should often have extra resources. 0-10 days per year. Pay extra for the health hazard, but that doesn't mean don't do it.
"If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am"
There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day).
But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.
If only 10% of Tax software users are affected, IRS may not give an extension and the customers would be cursing you. Probably worth it to keep those extra engineers on call during the tax season.
The registration website for my community college was like this. At certain times of night (and maybe weekend? not sure) it wouldn't let me register, and would instead put up a message that it was closed. I found this profoundly irritating. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't support it outside of business hours, but at least let me try, maybe, and we'll cross the support bridge if we come to it? There's no good reason (i.e. not reeking of incompetence) for the website to actually break in the few weeks of registration, so it's most likely a moot point in practice. Is there a hamster running in a wheel who powers the server? Does he have a union? Just let me sign up for my classes, you assholes.
Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.
FWIW many institutions don't want a middle ground between a registration/request being received, and it being in limbo somewhere.
We could compare it to refusing mailed in registrations or not setting up a post box for out of office submissions, those are long lived practices depending on the office, and they "just" brought it wholesale to the online world.
If it's that much easier for the staff to hold a mental model of what they do and how they work, I'd respect their choice even if it feels so alien in the online side.
Please explain how this "limbo" happens if I do an online registration at 2am but doesn't happen if I do an online registration at 2pm.
There isn't a person walking through the system with me, making sure it worked right. I could understand an office that only accepts appointments or phone calls, but this is an online system that breaks that direct connection no matter what time of day you use it.
There's a mismatch with reality, because there really is a delay between a registration being received and someone starting to work on it.
This sounds like a beginner PM's plan for a task management system. Just make the status DONE or NOT_DONE, tasks are always done roughly instantly, stop adding complications with your intermediate states! Later this leads to bugs or at least poor UX because tasks don't finish instantly, and someone is convinced to add IN_PROGRESS. Eventually we add CANCELLED and FAILED and UP_FOR_RETRY and, if we're unlucky, a hundred more states. The benefit of those depends on the application but there's always a benefit in representing the three states instead of two.
The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.
However, we can just put business hours on support, and would expect that the websites would generally work, unmonitored, while the SREs maintained a normal 40.
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that
B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal.
Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
One thing to note here is that the closure is a costly, credible, verifiable signal of commitment to their principles. Unusual or questionable principles, perhaps - few other Christians feel the need to close on Sunday - but principles nevertheless.
Suppose B&H or Chick-Fil-A suddenly changed their policy to be open, which is easy to verify (just see if you can buy something on that day). What do you think the reaction of their customers would be to this greater convenience and no loss of quality? Would they celebrate? I think the reaction would be highly negative - everyone would panic that they had sold out and the beancounters were now in charge and the quality was going to go downhill while the prices go up.
Precisely because the policy is so economically foolish and is not a marketing stunt (notice no one is clamoring to imitate them even though it's trivial: just close on some day) and would be one of the first things to go under new (ie. normal) management, it proves that they don't care that much about maximizing their profits but other things.
I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store.
But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience
As a shopper at B&H, that has encountered it, it's never bothered me, but their product generally doesn't need to be next day. If it was instacart/travel etc then yeah, I would be somewhere else in a heartbeat.
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.
Not only does B&H close their webshop on Saturdays, they also observe many holidays and close both their physical stores and webstore for them. This month they are open for only 18 days due to Passover.
I went and looked and the physical store is closed the full time, but they are accepting online orders Monday to Friday during Passover week, but are not shipping them until after.
Eh, B&H often has great prices for computer hardware and has a really excellent customer support for issues. I buy from them a few times a year and it's easy enough to just come back the next day rather then paying a few hundred dollars more to place an order now, especially when both options will ship at the same time regardless.
Canada's national tax authority website (CRA) has daily downtime from 3am - 6am EST. Which can be a pain for those on the west coast who can't find time to work on taxes until the wee hours.
Some Brazil government websites/apps have a "virtual queue" system.
During traffic surges, such as when government allows people to withdraw part of their unemployment fund for one reason or another, the site/app loads normally but display a page placing you in a queue with a dynamically updated ETA, usually several minutes or hours.
Los Angeles property tax website closes during parts of the year when they are updating who paid taxes. Last year IIRC they were closed for a few months, including if you wanted to get records of paid property tax for other times.
Another example is the IRS Employer ID site; only open during business hours. Frustrating when you go there on Saturday and get hyped to found your company, but I guess waiting 2 days to get an EID wasn't a big deal in retrospect.
I was going to mention this as well, from memory updating the services is in the pipeline so they made this front end that honoured the timings - and then a temporary solution became permanent.
I think planned and managed downtime is okay. A website, especially commercial ones, going down randomly, without a human readable status page destroys trust in them.
For example I planned to work on a project on sunday for which i would need some sterling silver sheets. My usual supplier is cooksongold.com, and since precious metal is such a high trust product I would be normaly very reluctant to go and search for a new supplier. But their website is on the fritz since yesterday. Which makes me think i need to find some new supplier. Who knows maybe they are going out of business even. Or maybe they are just having trouble with their database. That’s the kind of situation where the damage is. Where consumer behaviors can maybe permanently alter just because of some technical malfunction.
WordPress.com's support ticket form, in its early days, had business hours - you'd have to submit the ticket the next morning. I remember being pretty baffled the first time I ran into it.
Yeah! Or the team there prioritizes taking care of folks and maintaining boundaries between work and life by having that 3 hours of downtime during normal business hours.
Would love to hear other stories of businesses doing similar activities during sane weekday hours.
At my previous company (a Fortune 20) when I controlled maintenance for my applications...I scheduled it during the day because there is more resources if things screwed up. Rolling maintenance meant 0 down time, even if unsuccessful.
FWIW, online banking in Germany was like this until ~10 years ago (maybe 15). Sundays and overnight, the service would be closed "for maintenance". That was "fun".
I can imagine the systems were rickety that it was more convenient to have routine maintenance hours. Routine in the sense of "We just need to wait until tonight to fix the problem", rather than "We need to fix this, we have to apply for a maintenance period, wait for it to be announced to the customers, etc, etc."
Since it's Germany it'd have to go through to many departments and take at least a week to be approved.
> Hours: Monday-Friday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm, Saturday/Sunday 9:00 am to 3:00 pm
> Online Services is an unattended service after 7pm Monday through Thursday, after 1pm on Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday. If you have problems or questions please call Admissions and Records during normal business hours.
The next Wayback Machine snapshot, from May 2008, doesn't have the notice:
I've been working on https://joni-on-micro.site - which is hosted on an ESP32-S3 using the built-in esp-httpd, with Hugo for static site generation. This is the first time I'm posting it publicly, so I'm interested to see if it'll stay up.
I love the idea of a website with constraints that users can feel - and if I ever get too many concurrent visitors, I'll naturally stop serving requests.
(Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)
B2B websites often can keep regular business hours - if your customer base is working professionals in NA then outside of 9AM-8PM EST your site traffic probably drops dramatically. At my company we looked at analytics and realized our traffic is almost exclusively 9-5 EST while most folks work 9-5 PST so we just do large deploys after 4 PST.
I think being aware of your traffic patterns and incorporating that into business decisions is a great idea. OT, especially for potentially hair pulling off hours deployments, costs a lot of employee happiness - reserve it for when it's actually an emergency.
The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works:
> This story has been classified as developmentally harmful and has been given special protection measures. It can therefore only be read by registered users and only between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. Registered users have the option of carrying out age verification with us in order to be able to read such stories without time restrictions.
(google translated)
> Kingdom of Loathing, one of my favorite games growing up, has nightly maintenance windows - short daily ones, and a longer weekly one. And... that's about all that I found.
I feel like many websites in japan used to close at night, even ones that were aimed at foreigners. I remember up until very recently the website to purchase the JR Pass was closed for "maintenance" between 11pm-4am, so midday US time. At some point in the last 5 years this seems to have changed though, probably due to covid
I was thinking about this just yesterday, mostly in relation to notifications and expectation management. Often enough people conflate an online form with a business process that takes place immediately, and get mad that someone didn't respond to them "for a whole day" when they submitted the form at 6pm.
In India, UPI payments can happen around the clock but NEFT transfers after 8 pm waits till next day. Both handle similar orders of magnitude of money and are free, although UPI is more recent and meant for smartphones. There is also RTGS, which is realtime and costs a 1/17 USD and handles more money.
If your website provides me a respectable and decent service I am going to take that over than say a website that's open 24/7.
The same amount of quality will cost more for 24/7 availability so the likelihood of them cutting corners is more likely and thas causing a lack of quality. If however they don't then yeah, I guess you would.
You can't even read amazon reviews without logging in, now all you get is an AI generated summary.
My broadband provider is more expensive than the common domestic provider but they provide decent support so that's why I am content in forking the extra cost.
Sure, but you'd probably prefer a website that provides a respectable and decent service that's available 24/7 and didn't go out of their way to specifically stop providing service some of the time, often for no technical or practical reason.
For a _very_ long time, my bank's website and app was down for a few hours every night, I think at around 3am. I think they only stopped doing this with PSD2, after which they needed to support card 3dsecure with the app 24/7.
I'm seeing similar sticky scrolling in Safari on Mac for a narrow window (but it unsticks if I scroll fast enough...). I think this suggests something with the mobile view CSS. I'll keep investigating.
In the meantime, try reader mode. Sorry again and thanks for reporting!
Had the same issue, iPhone 15 in Chrome. Scrolling quickly didn't help. What did help: rotating into landscape and scrolling in the margins. Scrolling on the very right side of the screen also worked in portrait.
Once I scrolled down a bit, I was able to scroll normally afterwards.
On the content: I enjoyed your article! B&H being closed for Sabbath saved me from almost blowing $10k on camera gear a few years ago... everything in my cart, but couldn't check out. I wouldn't say I churned, but I also didn't come back to purchase because I had pre-buyers remorse.
As others in the comments have noted, though - I still come back and shop at B&H for other things, even though I've run into their closures. I actually like the humanity of it. For all the always-on-ness of the internet and websites... there's something innately "human" about something being closed, like B&H's site, that isn't upsetting to me.
I was gonna post “What if your website wouldn’t scroll?” But kudos to you for recognizing it and reproing the bug! Good article and found the references interesting
I see this a lot with municipal government or utilities websites. I rent and I'm not about to leave my state any time soon - it's not like I can "churn" and _not_ pay my power bill or go to a competitor.
Why? Who wrote the rule that websites need to be available 24/7?
Just because the server is powered 24/7 doesn't mean the website has too. I turn off my personal NAS when I go to bed. No point keeping it on while I am asleep.
In PDP days you were given a allotted time slot of usage.
There are no rules and you can do whatever you want.
But businesses are usually closed at certain times because it's not economical to keep them open. There are not enough customers looking to buy a pair of socks at 3AM to justify paying someone to sell socks. Or depending on where you live there are laws protecting workers so they get a bigger pay if they work at night etc. There could be other reasons.
If none of those things apply then it is pointless to apply the same restrictions as if they did apply. That would be like driving a car at the speed of a horse carriage.
Yes it is very much a thing in Japan, many sites are forced offline for "maintenance" in the early hours of every morning. Even physical ATMs can have business hours in Japan.
Depends on what you're selling. Patek Phillipe, Vacheron watches? Never mind business hours, it's "By Appointment only". A USB-c to USB-a adapter that I need tomorrow? Yeah you better be open buddy, or prime will.
Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s.
Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am.
The e-Tax system and various other government services still have these as well, mostly as daily maintenance windows. Some services use it to run data clean-up, consolidation, backup, etc. tasks so it’s not without reason.
The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (https://webstar.iatan.org/WebStarExtranetWEB/login.jsp) website, in addition to being extremely dated in its design, keeps business hours for accessing things like ID registration or travel agency certificate renewals. At first I thought it was a joke as the message displays something like, "we want to respect a work life balance and therefore only offer online services from X to Y." But for real, you can't access the online services during US based business hours.
It is wrong in so many ways. First of all the site is determining when the appropriate business hours are for its users, not taking into consideration moonlighters or other night owls. And second, it's a service for travel agents!! who are supposedly traveling to other time zones.
I get it if the people behind a service need to set limits on when they are expected to handle requests, but that doesn't mean the service shouldn't be available all the time. Good messaging and setting expectations for when requests will be handled are a much better solution in my opinion.
There was a time when I had to goto the bank in person during business hours and interact with a teller. There was zero chance of getting hacked, the tellers knew me, and I had to live a more intentional life. Perhaps business hours for a website means real people are there actively monitoring its security and activity.
I should hope nobody's wasting their days doing that.
Since that is a airline-related website, and you wouldn't probably believe me, but is this a possible case of very old backend systems running in batch outside of office hours? This is such a serious issue that some legacy government websites, like UK's DVLA, to this day still has an operating hours (https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...)
I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time.
During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes.
I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.
> assumptions about always-on digital services
And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect.
I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one.
If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones.
Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
> Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .
That's way too big of a risk, and way too much stress to put on your customers.
For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week. 2% of the year.
In general, big release dates or important deadline should often have extra resources. 0-10 days per year. Pay extra for the health hazard, but that doesn't mean don't do it.
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"If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am"
There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day).
But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.
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If only 10% of Tax software users are affected, IRS may not give an extension and the customers would be cursing you. Probably worth it to keep those extra engineers on call during the tax season.
This reminded me somewhat of Pony Messenger which does one "mail drop" a day.
This would be an interesting variant of greylisting. Anything sent after business hours goes on the greylist.
The registration website for my community college was like this. At certain times of night (and maybe weekend? not sure) it wouldn't let me register, and would instead put up a message that it was closed. I found this profoundly irritating. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't support it outside of business hours, but at least let me try, maybe, and we'll cross the support bridge if we come to it? There's no good reason (i.e. not reeking of incompetence) for the website to actually break in the few weeks of registration, so it's most likely a moot point in practice. Is there a hamster running in a wheel who powers the server? Does he have a union? Just let me sign up for my classes, you assholes.
Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.
FWIW many institutions don't want a middle ground between a registration/request being received, and it being in limbo somewhere.
We could compare it to refusing mailed in registrations or not setting up a post box for out of office submissions, those are long lived practices depending on the office, and they "just" brought it wholesale to the online world.
If it's that much easier for the staff to hold a mental model of what they do and how they work, I'd respect their choice even if it feels so alien in the online side.
Please explain how this "limbo" happens if I do an online registration at 2am but doesn't happen if I do an online registration at 2pm.
There isn't a person walking through the system with me, making sure it worked right. I could understand an office that only accepts appointments or phone calls, but this is an online system that breaks that direct connection no matter what time of day you use it.
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There's a mismatch with reality, because there really is a delay between a registration being received and someone starting to work on it.
This sounds like a beginner PM's plan for a task management system. Just make the status DONE or NOT_DONE, tasks are always done roughly instantly, stop adding complications with your intermediate states! Later this leads to bugs or at least poor UX because tasks don't finish instantly, and someone is convinced to add IN_PROGRESS. Eventually we add CANCELLED and FAILED and UP_FOR_RETRY and, if we're unlucky, a hundred more states. The benefit of those depends on the application but there's always a benefit in representing the three states instead of two.
There was no limbo state. When the website was working at all, it was fully automatic and told you immediately if your classes were registered or not.
The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.
However, we can just put business hours on support, and would expect that the websites would generally work, unmonitored, while the SREs maintained a normal 40.
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that
B&H is so good that I don't care when their online store is closed, I just come back later. That they are still in business (and flourishing, from what I can see) is proof that their service is so good that people are loyal.
Chick-fil-A is famously closed every Sunday, yet is one of the most successful restaurants.
One thing to note here is that the closure is a costly, credible, verifiable signal of commitment to their principles. Unusual or questionable principles, perhaps - few other Christians feel the need to close on Sunday - but principles nevertheless.
Suppose B&H or Chick-Fil-A suddenly changed their policy to be open, which is easy to verify (just see if you can buy something on that day). What do you think the reaction of their customers would be to this greater convenience and no loss of quality? Would they celebrate? I think the reaction would be highly negative - everyone would panic that they had sold out and the beancounters were now in charge and the quality was going to go downhill while the prices go up.
Precisely because the policy is so economically foolish and is not a marketing stunt (notice no one is clamoring to imitate them even though it's trivial: just close on some day) and would be one of the first things to go under new (ie. normal) management, it proves that they don't care that much about maximizing their profits but other things.
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Closing a website and closing a physical retail establishment don’t seem comparable.
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I guess they are willing to take that risk to fulfil their religious obligations - If you aren't allowed to do business it doesn't really matter if that business is online or in the store.
But I think that if you are familiar with B&H this wouldn't really be a surprise and it's pretty rare that you find yourself unexpectedly needing a new SLR on saturday morning in my experience
As a shopper at B&H, that has encountered it, it's never bothered me, but their product generally doesn't need to be next day. If it was instacart/travel etc then yeah, I would be somewhere else in a heartbeat.
> The B&H example is ridiculous and I definitely would churn if I ran into that.
Not only does B&H close their webshop on Saturdays, they also observe many holidays and close both their physical stores and webstore for them. This month they are open for only 18 days due to Passover.
I went and looked and the physical store is closed the full time, but they are accepting online orders Monday to Friday during Passover week, but are not shipping them until after.
They're about to close for the entirety of Passover, so, if you thought <24hrs was bad, those of us who like them just aren't ordering for 9 days...
Eh, B&H often has great prices for computer hardware and has a really excellent customer support for issues. I buy from them a few times a year and it's easy enough to just come back the next day rather then paying a few hundred dollars more to place an order now, especially when both options will ship at the same time regardless.
Canada's national tax authority website (CRA) has daily downtime from 3am - 6am EST. Which can be a pain for those on the west coast who can't find time to work on taxes until the wee hours.
In Québec the site for handling drivers licences used to be like that, no online services from 11pm till some early morning hour.
I've seen government websites like this: Closed after hours and on weekends.
Some Brazil government websites/apps have a "virtual queue" system.
During traffic surges, such as when government allows people to withdraw part of their unemployment fund for one reason or another, the site/app loads normally but display a page placing you in a queue with a dynamically updated ETA, usually several minutes or hours.
Example (news article in Portuguese): https://epocanegocios.globo.com/economia/noticia/2023/07/dis...
A weird way to rate limit... I guess it perfectly emulates the real life experience of waiting in line for hours in government branches.
I remember having to wait in a queue to download maps and mods and whatnot for Quake and similar games in the late 90s.
Los Angeles property tax website closes during parts of the year when they are updating who paid taxes. Last year IIRC they were closed for a few months, including if you wanted to get records of paid property tax for other times.
Unemployment phone number I had to call was like this. If you missed it no money that week.
Another example is the IRS Employer ID site; only open during business hours. Frustrating when you go there on Saturday and get hyped to found your company, but I guess waiting 2 days to get an EID wasn't a big deal in retrospect.
Relevant given a lot of the discussion here: Why some DVLA services don't work at night
https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...
(they were frontends to old systems that were based on assumptions of when data would be submitted)
I was going to mention this as well, from memory updating the services is in the pipeline so they made this front end that honoured the timings - and then a temporary solution became permanent.
I really like Elle's Homepage[0] where the webpage is set to "sleep mode" during certain hours.
[0]: https://ellesho.me/page/
So like Gossip's Cafe? https://gossips.cafe
I think planned and managed downtime is okay. A website, especially commercial ones, going down randomly, without a human readable status page destroys trust in them.
For example I planned to work on a project on sunday for which i would need some sterling silver sheets. My usual supplier is cooksongold.com, and since precious metal is such a high trust product I would be normaly very reluctant to go and search for a new supplier. But their website is on the fritz since yesterday. Which makes me think i need to find some new supplier. Who knows maybe they are going out of business even. Or maybe they are just having trouble with their database. That’s the kind of situation where the damage is. Where consumer behaviors can maybe permanently alter just because of some technical malfunction.
WordPress.com's support ticket form, in its early days, had business hours - you'd have to submit the ticket the next morning. I remember being pretty baffled the first time I ran into it.
Like, I get live chat having hours… but a form?
Steam, for some reason, has server maintenance from 3-6PM PST on Tuesdays
Maybe their largest market is Europe? Or they make enough money that their engineers don't want to work late hours.
Yeah! Or the team there prioritizes taking care of folks and maintaining boundaries between work and life by having that 3 hours of downtime during normal business hours.
Would love to hear other stories of businesses doing similar activities during sane weekday hours.
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At my previous company (a Fortune 20) when I controlled maintenance for my applications...I scheduled it during the day because there is more resources if things screwed up. Rolling maintenance meant 0 down time, even if unsuccessful.
Are you implying that's a bad time? What time would you pick?
Steam is under heavy use at all times, and the lowest user count is roughly from 3PM-2AM PST.
And being partially off for 3 hours a week is pretty far from "business hours".
If I was steam I think I’d find a way to have zero downtime deployments. A/B or whatever
FWIW, online banking in Germany was like this until ~10 years ago (maybe 15). Sundays and overnight, the service would be closed "for maintenance". That was "fun".
I can imagine the systems were rickety that it was more convenient to have routine maintenance hours. Routine in the sense of "We just need to wait until tonight to fix the problem", rather than "We need to fix this, we have to apply for a maintenance period, wait for it to be announced to the customers, etc, etc."
Since it's Germany it'd have to go through to many departments and take at least a week to be approved.
New Zealand's online Lotto (lottery) service only operates in strict business hours.
> MyLotto operates between 6.30 am and 11 pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and between 6.30 am and midnight on Wednesday and Saturday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto_New_Zealand
Here's an example from August 2007 of a community college website that had hours:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070822082110/https://onlineser...
> Hours: Monday-Friday, 7:00 am to 10:00 pm, Saturday/Sunday 9:00 am to 3:00 pm
> Online Services is an unattended service after 7pm Monday through Thursday, after 1pm on Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday. If you have problems or questions please call Admissions and Records during normal business hours.
The next Wayback Machine snapshot, from May 2008, doesn't have the notice:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080519115756/http://onlineserv...
I've been working on https://joni-on-micro.site - which is hosted on an ESP32-S3 using the built-in esp-httpd, with Hugo for static site generation. This is the first time I'm posting it publicly, so I'm interested to see if it'll stay up.
I love the idea of a website with constraints that users can feel - and if I ever get too many concurrent visitors, I'll naturally stop serving requests.
(Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)
Related Our website is closed on Sundays (48 points, 8 months ago, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997086
B2B websites often can keep regular business hours - if your customer base is working professionals in NA then outside of 9AM-8PM EST your site traffic probably drops dramatically. At my company we looked at analytics and realized our traffic is almost exclusively 9-5 EST while most folks work 9-5 PST so we just do large deploys after 4 PST.
I think being aware of your traffic patterns and incorporating that into business decisions is a great idea. OT, especially for potentially hair pulling off hours deployments, costs a lot of employee happiness - reserve it for when it's actually an emergency.
The German fanfiction site fanfiktion.de has restricted reading times for certain explicit works:
> This story has been classified as developmentally harmful and has been given special protection measures. It can therefore only be read by registered users and only between 11:00 pm and 4:00 am. Registered users have the option of carrying out age verification with us in order to be able to read such stories without time restrictions. (google translated)
> Kingdom of Loathing, one of my favorite games growing up, has nightly maintenance windows - short daily ones, and a longer weekly one. And... that's about all that I found.
So does KONAMI's e-amusement service, affecting arcade games and home versions alike: https://iidx.org/eamuse_maint
I feel like many websites in japan used to close at night, even ones that were aimed at foreigners. I remember up until very recently the website to purchase the JR Pass was closed for "maintenance" between 11pm-4am, so midday US time. At some point in the last 5 years this seems to have changed though, probably due to covid
I was thinking about this just yesterday, mostly in relation to notifications and expectation management. Often enough people conflate an online form with a business process that takes place immediately, and get mad that someone didn't respond to them "for a whole day" when they submitted the form at 6pm.
In India, UPI payments can happen around the clock but NEFT transfers after 8 pm waits till next day. Both handle similar orders of magnitude of money and are free, although UPI is more recent and meant for smartphones. There is also RTGS, which is realtime and costs a 1/17 USD and handles more money.
Sidekiq - a background job framework for Rails, has an office hour, for which you have to RSVP for.
That seemed like a reasonable way to set boundaries but provide some entry level support.
https://sidekiq.org/support.html
This is actually a thing in the Bolika. You can not access government official sites after 10 pm.
A physical business can put up a closed sign. That closed sign has 24/7 uptime. (Sans vandalism, natural disasters)
I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed.
But you won't be competitive and you will lose customers!
If your website provides me a respectable and decent service I am going to take that over than say a website that's open 24/7.
The same amount of quality will cost more for 24/7 availability so the likelihood of them cutting corners is more likely and thas causing a lack of quality. If however they don't then yeah, I guess you would.
You can't even read amazon reviews without logging in, now all you get is an AI generated summary.
My broadband provider is more expensive than the common domestic provider but they provide decent support so that's why I am content in forking the extra cost.
Sure, but you'd probably prefer a website that provides a respectable and decent service that's available 24/7 and didn't go out of their way to specifically stop providing service some of the time, often for no technical or practical reason.
> I guess for a website you could do similar by flicking cloudflare over to an IP serving a were closed.
Huh? Why would you need Cloudflare and a separate IP for that? You can just have your server serve a different thing in certain hours
For a _very_ long time, my bank's website and app was down for a few hours every night, I think at around 3am. I think they only stopped doing this with PSD2, after which they needed to support card 3dsecure with the app 24/7.
I am unable to scroll on this webpage, it just keeps snapping to the top.
Should I blame Safari on iPhone?
(Author here) Sorry about this!
I'm seeing similar sticky scrolling in Safari on Mac for a narrow window (but it unsticks if I scroll fast enough...). I think this suggests something with the mobile view CSS. I'll keep investigating.
In the meantime, try reader mode. Sorry again and thanks for reporting!
Had the same issue, iPhone 15 in Chrome. Scrolling quickly didn't help. What did help: rotating into landscape and scrolling in the margins. Scrolling on the very right side of the screen also worked in portrait.
Once I scrolled down a bit, I was able to scroll normally afterwards.
On the content: I enjoyed your article! B&H being closed for Sabbath saved me from almost blowing $10k on camera gear a few years ago... everything in my cart, but couldn't check out. I wouldn't say I churned, but I also didn't come back to purchase because I had pre-buyers remorse.
As others in the comments have noted, though - I still come back and shop at B&H for other things, even though I've run into their closures. I actually like the humanity of it. For all the always-on-ness of the internet and websites... there's something innately "human" about something being closed, like B&H's site, that isn't upsetting to me.
I was gonna post “What if your website wouldn’t scroll?” But kudos to you for recognizing it and reproing the bug! Good article and found the references interesting
Have the same issue on iPhone 16 pro, my solution process is to turn off adblocker (didn’t work), use reader (works great)
Website is closed for the day?
Seemed like some of us would just need to window shop.
I see this a lot with municipal government or utilities websites. I rent and I'm not about to leave my state any time soon - it's not like I can "churn" and _not_ pay my power bill or go to a competitor.
Add NY dol unemployment website to the list.
Ah, great, as if it wasn't enough that most of the offline world is out of sync with us night-owls.
> What if your website had business hours?
That idea is contrary to the definition or reason for the existence of Websites.
Why? Who wrote the rule that websites need to be available 24/7?
Just because the server is powered 24/7 doesn't mean the website has too. I turn off my personal NAS when I go to bed. No point keeping it on while I am asleep.
In PDP days you were given a allotted time slot of usage.
Because the marginal cost of keeping the website is (presumably) negligible. The whole point is asynchronous communication and transaction.
There are no rules and you can do whatever you want.
But businesses are usually closed at certain times because it's not economical to keep them open. There are not enough customers looking to buy a pair of socks at 3AM to justify paying someone to sell socks. Or depending on where you live there are laws protecting workers so they get a bigger pay if they work at night etc. There could be other reasons.
If none of those things apply then it is pointless to apply the same restrictions as if they did apply. That would be like driving a car at the speed of a horse carriage.
> personal NAS
You have complete freedom on things that you tag as "personal".
A "business" is always looking to grow upwards and onwards.
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Being down costs money and wastes time. Find ways to have zero downtime migrations.
Then half the world wouldn't be able to ever see it =)
This sounds like it would be a thing in Japan. Is it?
Yes it is very much a thing in Japan, many sites are forced offline for "maintenance" in the early hours of every morning. Even physical ATMs can have business hours in Japan.
Depends on what you're selling. Patek Phillipe, Vacheron watches? Never mind business hours, it's "By Appointment only". A USB-c to USB-a adapter that I need tomorrow? Yeah you better be open buddy, or prime will.
Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s.
Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am.
The e-Tax system and various other government services still have these as well, mostly as daily maintenance windows. Some services use it to run data clean-up, consolidation, backup, etc. tasks so it’s not without reason.
no please :(
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And if my website had wheels, it would be a wagon
And you can get wheels overnight via Amazon. Because they don't have business hours.