Egg's failure is beyond a yolk

This week is Business Continuity Awareness week. It's the sort of annual awareness-raising initiative that should be applauded, but - you guessed it - it has dutifully coincided with a handful of fairly major websites suffering the indignity of serious downtime.

Microsoft.com, msn.com and msnbc.com have all fallen over today (for unspecified technical reasons), joining online bank Egg, whose site has been "up and down" since Monday following a server upgrade. Egg's home page has remained intact, but some customers have not been able to access their accounts. These outages are (as far as we know) not the result of the handiwork of hackers. Now, any company relying heavily on its online presence knows that, despite the best technical planning in the world, these things happen. Sometimes it's hard to apportion too much blame. But Egg did do something unforgivable, something endemic in this industry - it failed to tell its customers what was going on. The Egg account holder who tipped us off about the problem had failed to get a straight answer out of the bank despite two calls to customer service representatives. Only on the third attempt was he told there had been a technical glitch. He told us: "What annoys me most is the lack of information provided to the customers. If their home page is working, which it was, it should contain a notice, and their telephone system should announce to all customers that there is a problem." Silence is not always the best policy. IT has long had a culture of secrecy, partly because other people in businesses tend to have their own culture of blame, pointing the finger at IT whenever things go wrong. But as more companies like Egg appear, IT and the business are one and the same, and that culture of covering your rear end at all costs should go. People may forgive a mistake, but they don't like being kept in the dark. The chances are that a strategy of keeping schtum will backfire. Openness has to be the only way forward.