Actually we do do that – whenever there is an outage we keep everyone posted on Twitter and Facebook.

Mathew – Why do we need to know stuff before it’s fully ready to be disclosed? Journalists operate in a world of breaking stories. The rest of us don’t live by the same currency you do.

Last night is a prime example. The reporting on the what, when and where was pretty darned bad leading up to the President’s delivery. Now, is there supposed to be some White House tweet action flowing setting the matter straight in real-time? I don’t think so!! I want THE authoritative read of things ONLY when it’s ready for consumption and not before UNLESS it’s actionable. Hearing there was a tsunami headed my way AFTER the fact… not so good. Hearing there IS a tsunami headed my way early enough to be actionable… Good.

Amazon’s tsunami hit. No opportunity to adjust course.

Sony’s network fully pwned. No opportunity to adjust except to lock down your cc/debit card(s).

Apple’s found to be doing “something” that we’re not quite sure of and they’re lambasted for not divulging things fast enough?
Next time Gigaom.com goes down… I hope you’re on Twitter, Facebook, IRC, etc giving us the blow by blow of what’s going on and when things can be expected resume. Lead by example Mathew. Lead by example.

“Apple is a lost cause” because it handles it’s PR so badly? WTF? Based on what evidence? Apple has one of the best PR machines on the planet.

Just because Apple doesn’t follow *your* idea of how fast a company should respond (based on absolutely nothing BTW), they are in trouble? How many fortune 500 companies have you run?

Also, these situations that you are crumpling together for this article are in no way similar. Sony has yet to even apologise for their problem (which is a very *real* problem of very *large* proportions), and they didn’t reveal all the information at first when they started talking about it. Apple on the other hand, laid out all the facts out about their issue (which turns out to be nothing but a small bug), in their very first missive.

The only difference between what Apple did and what you are suggesting is that you wanted them to pick up the phone and say “we are looking into it” first. I think everyone was pretty sure they were looking into it already.

“Apple was shown to be keeping a log of the location of millions of iPhone users”

No, no it wasn’t. There was a log of cell towers and WiFi hot spots, some dozens of miles away from the actual users. Apple doesn’t have a problem; “real time” reporting caused a so-called crisis where there wasn’t one.

When the media starts publishing retractions at the same level of prominence to it’s false statement – e.g. “Sorry we reported X, we were wrong, it’s actually Y”, then companies can start responding quicker.

I think you’re wrong that quicker responses would reduce the media sensationalism.

Quicker responses to non-issues would just make it more tempting for the media to drum up scandals where none exist – because a response implies that there was substance.

Don’t forget that the media has a product too – information. Don’t you think there should be a scandal about how much of it is faulty?

What Matt is advocating Ist hat tech repairing be reduced to Gawker like “let’s stir up the angry mobs” sensationalism.

The problem was not Apple’s response, Matt, the problem is journalist not doing journalism but instead shooting from the hip and crying for blood before any kind of investigation has been done.

Funny how you cite Toyota as deserving an A+. They took MONTHS to fully research the claims and then the media didn’t believe them. Only a year later when the government confirmed Toyota’s investigation into the cause was driver error did the media apologize for jumping to conclusions.

Oh wait they didn’t.

Matt, they used to call this yellow journalism.

I do think there are subtle differences to consider, though.
- In Sony’s case, it was a breach, plain and simple, and the only reason to delay anything was to assist investigators by not playing the company’s hand.
- In Apple’s case, it “did what it says on the tin”—but the tin was a huge, obscure terms of service document most customers didn’t read, and Jobs’ cursory response only made things worse.
- In Amazon’s case, I think much of the blame can be laid at the feet of site architects who assumed clouds are like servers. There’s a big difference: as Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, has repeatedly said, in a cloud you design for failure. Most of those affected hadn’t properly designed redundancy. That said, Amazon’s first line of defense against machine failures, known as Availability Zones, didn’t isolate the failure.

In my experience running large, complex systems, the first diagnosis is seldom the right one, and giving out false information can lead to confusion later on as well as to unwarranted panic that exacerbates the problem. On the other hand, we need greater transparency from the public cloud tools we rely on for processing, entertainment, and nearly every other facet of our lives.

With most of the legal system firmly entrenched in the world of atoms, it’s going to take crises like these—and the inevitable hand-wringing and lawsuit-flinging—to decide what the right course of action should be. For now, I agree that companies should err on the side of transparency, as long as we allow them to revise their explanations later.