Just had an update on the website. It seems that the issue was being worked on back on Friday but now awaiting response from the host as the problem appears to be at their end…
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There’s another strange thing. If you go to the Focal website everything works normally except if you select Focal universe and then go to Focal powered by Naim network,you get the same: 503 service temporarily unavailable.
Are they removing Naim stuff completely?
Maybe it’s different in France, but all the organisations that I have had any professional contact with would regard having the main website for a business down for a few hours as a top priority problem to solve asap and the responsible guy wouldn’t be allowed to push off for the weekend without fixing it or having someone else (his boss?) taking it on.
Also anyone providing hosting services to a business would regard fixing a problem like this as top priority for their customer because web hosting that is unreliable is an existential issue.
It all seems remarkably amateurish to me.
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14/7
Well it is Bastille Day……and Les Blues field with Spain in their semi final tonight……and its 30C still outside….I’m off for a snooze…..
Indeed.
It’s very frustrating for Naim for sure. Unfortunately it has coincided with a long bank holiday in France (most things also closed or people off on the Monday as well as the Tuesday) which hasn’t helped.
Isn’t this the fifth day of the downage (if that’s a thing)? You’d think a company, especially one with turnover down a further £3m in 2025 would treat it as something a bit more urgent. It’s presumably not that hard to get a website back up, or indeed to have systems in place to prevent it going down in the first place.
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Does the website really drive much revenue directly? You can’t buy from it, and the place you’d go to get Naim gear, i.e. a dealer will still be able to provide a pretty good service. I’m not sure Naim is an impulse buy.
That’s not to say it isn’t a bit embarrassing but, in the grand scheme of things…
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I talked about this with people from Naim yesterday and, as I say, it’s hugely frustrating for them, but unfortunately it’s out of their hands, made even more difficult by the long holiday weekend in France.
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But like David said above, it’s terribly amateurish, and that’s putting it very very politely. You wrote that the one (!) person who might know was off on Friday, then it’s the weekend, then it’s a two day bank holiday in France. As websites operate 24/7, so should their support. It’s not like Naim is a small local business. It’s a multimillion £ company operating worldwide. If I was Barco I would not be happy. Hopefully this incident will prompt a review of web hosting and resilience.
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Remind me, was the Terror before of after the storming of the Bastille……..?
ATB, J
I hope they’re enjoying their cake 
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Not to defend them but →
Web hosting companies often make changes that impact the publishing of a website online. A lot of these are security related, and clients are (usually) given plenty of notice to be aware of an upcoming update that might break the chain that keeps it on screen.
Understandably, nothing is more frustrating than getting everything running well, you leave it untouched, and then it disappears.
In this case, it might be that one or both parties are actually responsible for the down time by taking their eyes off the ball, and unfortunately it’s not a quick fix.
I don’t recall seeing this from any other non-trivial company, for so long. I hope it isn’t a rat I can smell.
It does matter, @Ian_S . Naim gear is expensive. If one were on the cusp of spending say £30k - it could easily be much more - one would likely value comfort that the manufacturer is, as far as can be determined by an observer, very much a going concern. I’m at the point where if I upgrade further it would be to a full 300 NC system which is a lot of money. I’d be nervous if I were about to sign a cheque at the moment.
I’m surprised that Naim have not even been able to arrange for an ‘apologies’ splash screen to appear for the duration of any problem, if that is what the situation is. All we have atm is the sort of automatic, system message that would appear of the site simply doesn’t work, or isn’t there at all.
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You mean like unpaid invoices…….
.
ATB, J
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Certainly the number of days and the apparent lack of an “on call” for outage is unusual.
I would be amazed if the hosting provider’s contract wasn’t terminated after something like this. Though the larger they are, the less likely they are to care.
I run a small business and would never allow the site to be down for that long. Bit of a concern unless they’re about to relaunch the brand.
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Absolutely. And TBH, there’s always something that can be done. If the hosting party are cowboys, in an emergency you can deploy the site to somewhere else and update DNS to point there instead.
Something like this may be blamed on the hosting provider but usually there are a string of failures that lead to this nonsense.
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Careers page remains online