Laying The Blame and Giving Credit

Let's all give Tom Keating a round of applause for his up to the minute coverage around the Packet 8 outage this past week.

Tom's dogged determination drove to the bottom of the story that concluded in his reporting to be a database server of Packet8's that caused the issue.

The fact that it was inside Level3's data center never really should have been part of the story. To their credit Packet8 has a web page that tells you all systems are running smoothly. But Level3 got blamed here and they may not really have been at fault.

We're living in an era where news can spread faster than the cause of a problem can be found. While no one ever wants to hear "no comment" we may need to use more of it while the correct facts are gathered. That means we need to be both respectful of time and responsive professionally to inquiries in an era where the rumor will be heard first, and the real story never seeing the light of day by the same audience. You see, the rumor is always tastier than the truth.