Problem Management: your customers deserve a (reasonable) explanation

I read on  The Opposite of Luck blog a post about a forensic report explaining the cause of an incident that caused an outage at Fisher’s Plaza Technology Complex in Seattle and took down many websites hosted there.

Like them, I applause how transparently Fisher’s Plaza have dealt with this incident, specially regarding their tenants, as they really deserve an explanation.

You can read the full report here.

Your users also deserve an explanation when an IT service goes down; you don’t have to give them a 12 page report for every problem you manage, but you can’t simply shrug your shoulders and tell them “shit happens”.