William McCall wrote:

I could see someone complaining about the idea of letting a third party carry outage info like that... at least in my environment. How else do you propose getting outage information to your customers?

If the information provider is under your control (not a 3rd party), then whatever took out your primary services (internet services, phone services) might also take out your access to the outage channel that is under your control (e.g. fat-fingered admin messes up an ACL). I *like it* when my service provider has an OOB network outage channel. My biggest complaint has been with networks that setup a channel like this but then get "too busy" during an outage to make use of it. If you are going to setup a channel like this, make sure you use it. Also, if you post a partial update, make sure you follow up with more information when you have it. Some of us read the archives to see if this information was posted and followed-up on in a timely fashion, to evaluate the outage reporting service record before signing up. Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

If your email and phone communications are down due to a connectivity break, and your customers get connectivity from you [assume no backup links, by default .. you'd be surprised at how many smaller customers get by with a single link and no backups at all. If their connectivity is down too - they just cant get to twitter right? Um... what about text messages to these newfangled cell phone thingies?

http://www.ehow.com/how_2075926_use-twitter-cell-phone.html Unless you are AT&T or Comcast (or similar) and your customers have U-Verse or Comcast Triple Play (or similar) it has to be a fairly widespread outage to take out your customer's landlines, internet, and cell phones too. If your network has that big of an outage, your customers can follow the outage news updates on the radio. jc