CNet has an article that talks about Rim’s explanation for the outage Tuesday night. Seems that it was one of those cascading if it can go wrong it will go wrong series of problems.

I find the reactions to the outage interesting. The tech press and blogosphere was all over RIM for not saying more about what was happening along the way. RIM didn’t say much more than we have a problem and we are working on it.

The stock market didn’t seem to care much though.

There are growing expectations for organizations to be transparent, and to communicate immediately. But those expectations are often unrealistic. How, for example, was RIM supposed to immediately tell customers exactly what the problem was and how long it would be before it was fixed?

And if RIM had given out more details and expectations for repair times earlier, and they turned out to be wrong – I’ll bet they would have been chastised for getting it wrong.

One thing is clear, though. The increasing expectation to communicate makes it important for organizations to communicate with its customers quickly when something goes wrong – even if they don’t have much to say. Many assume that if you say nothing, you must have something to hide. It may not be easy to figure out what to say, but you need to say something, and update it regularly – even if that update doesn’t say much new.

Read the CNet article

Read an ITBusiness.ca article about the communications issue