OpenID and the San Francisco Power Outage

As most of you probably know already San Francisco has been hit by a power outage yesterday and many well known companies like Technorati, Six Apart, and Craigslist have been affected; which simply means they have been down for a few hours.

So where is the connection to OpenID here, you may ask? The O’Reilly Radar article mentions it already (scroll down to the updates there); if you have a LiveJournal OpenID you probably should care. LiveJournal belongs to Six Apart and therefore has been affected as well. People could not use their OpenID because their Identity Provider (=LiveJournal) was unavailable. Bummer! You want to sign in to your favourite website but you can’t because your Identity Provider (IdP) is down; for whatever the reasons might be.

However Relying Parties (RP) can help their customers by let them associate more than one OpenID to existing accounts. So in most cases customers would still be able to sign in even if one of their IdP’s was unavailable or they didn’t trust them anymore. By the way, OpenID delegation is no solution if the IdP is down. Though unfortunately most RP’s don’t provide that service already. Time to change this, I guess; and even if it was for just monetary reasons: less visitors, less clicks, less revenue.