Another ball drop for old-school crisis management. Amazon’s S3 service was down for a period of time this morning. Bad, REALLY bad. This knocked static file services offline for a HUGE number of web 2.0 sites. But the even worse thing (as noted by ZDNet ) is that as I’m writing this, 6+ hours after the situation was mostly resolved, there is NO acknowledgment of the issue on the AWS blog. Nada. Nothin’. Last post from 4 days ago.

Sure, there’s a developer’s forum thread that has been occasionally updated, and as always happens in these situations, they state “we’re heads down on the problem; no time to chat!”. But, um…that’s not where J. Random Web 2.0 CTO is going to start when checking on things. This informational black hole is simply unacceptable today…it shows a high-level managerial misunderstanding of the nature of the interactivity that’s expected today via our enhanced communication tools (blogging, micro blogs, SNSs, etc.)

There’s no technical reason not to throw up a quick post…”stuff is broken, we’re working on it. Updates to come.” and updating it as you go along. (Heck, just cut-and-paste from ZDNet if you’re unoriginal) Nothing except PHBs that don’t like information leaving before it’s tarted up, properly spun, and moved close to the smoke-and-mirror machine. I’m disappointed, Amazon. Not only does it show a lack of vision, it also allows other sources to get ahead of you in discussing the topic, and take control of the conversation. Which is what we’re having about you…even though you’re not participating. Funny…we just passed the 10 year anniversary of the The Cluetrain Manifesto…and sometimes I wonder exactly how much has changed.