There is an old saying that “silence is golden.” In two words, this is “not true.” Yesterday Verizon (News - Alert) experienced a significant and rather prolonged outage of its Verizon.net e-mail service. As you can see from the link, I covered this not just from a news standpoint but also from a user standpoint because I am a customer. At the end of that posting I promised an update. Here it is.

Let me start with the e-mail I received at 6:41 p.m. last night from Verizon (click for larger image):

Thanks. They sincerely apologize. I guess that is better than insincerely.

Second, it is now over 24 hours since the outage and here is how you find out information about it. First you visit Twitter (News - Alert) @VerizonSupport. As of 9:15 a.m., here is the feed. 

But wait. It appears there is hope by clicking on the outage link. I won’t spoil your delight except to say that other than another dated (9/12/13 3:40 p.m.) recognition that there is a problem, you are pointed back to the Twitter feed. Talk about a virtuous circle. 

I am not going to rehash my previous rants about the seemingly unprecedented inability of communications companies to communicate properly with customers during a crisis. At this point I would settle with just having my SENT Mail folder back. 

Part of me is actually pleased that this was personal and not something to report on from afar. It only amplifies the points I have made over the last several weeks about the need for transparency and an explanation as to what happened and what to do. As I used to tell me kids, “I know you are sorry. You are sorry you got caught. Now change your behavior.” 

The facts are that we still have no clue as to what happened, i.e., human error, systems error or cyber attack. That is not a good thing. This clearly is not a case of “no news is good news.”

My big learning from the past few days is to bookmark isitdownrightnow. You might wish to do so as well.  In the meantime, thank goodness for Outlook (who ever thought I would say that) and Gmail.