For those of us in the media business, BusinessWire.com is a place that—like the old habit of waking up and reading the print version of the newspaper—we religiously check to make sure nothing that we cover has escaped our inbox. Imagine the surprise this Friday in front of the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S. when I was unable to load the website.
It should be noted this is not from lack of trying on four different browsers. Clearly the website is having issues. Since it is impossible to tell (by the way, it is roughly 8:15 a.m. EDT and I have been trying since 7:30 a.m. EDT) if the problem is associated with planned maintenance, a system malfunction, human error of some type or whether the popular site is under attack.
What is interesting is that on the BusinessWire Twitter (News - Alert) feed there is zero info. In fact, below is a snapshot of that feed at 8:15 a.m. EDT.
Source (News - Alert): BusinessWire Twitter feed
Given that BusinessWire rightfully prides itself on being an up-to-the-minute source of news, it’s surprising that on their Twitter feed the last item is from May 21, two days ago, and as has been the case when major websites have been compromised recently, there is no news. In fact, eBay (News - Alert) is getting crucified, and rightfully so for its lack of transparency as to what happened this past week, particularly in the face of a promise to keep users informed. I congratulated them on getting out there with the news on their blog and that promise, but eBay’s lack of instructions and follow-through has been nothing short of appalling. In fact, regulators in the U.K. and a growing list of State Attorney Generals’ in the U.S. are talking about launching major investigations of eBay.
Since this is breaking news, will try and provide an update when BusinessWire is back, hopefully with an explanation.
UPDATE: 8:50 AM EDT and BusinessWire is back online but with no explanation as to what happened.