Quote in WSJ

In today's issue of the Wall Street Journal:

Lenny Rachitsky, the head of research and development for the website monitoring company Webmetrics.com, said companies can take advantage of unexpected outages by communicating with customers about what is going on—something Amazon didn't do during the outage, beyond its note to sellers. "Customers don't expect you to be perfect, as long as they feel that they can trust you," he said. "All it takes is to give your users some sense of control."

A similar sentiment was posited by Eric Savitz over at Barrons:

So, here’s the thing: it seems to me that Amazon actually made a bad situation worse by failing to communicate the details of the situation with its customers. My little post Tuesday afternoon on the technical troubles triggered 149 comments, and counting. The company’s customers did not like having the site go down, and even more, they did not like being left in the dark. And so far, the company still has not come clean on what went wrong. Some of the people who commented on my previous post were worried that their personal data might have been compromised. I have no real reason to think that was the case, but it certainly seems odd to me that Amazon has taken what appear to be a defensive and closed-mouth stance on an issue so basic to its customers: the ability to simply use the site. Jeff Bezos, your customers deserve better.