There was a lengthy outage of the Yahoo Messenger and email services late Saturday into Sunday morning.  We tried to contact Yahoo to find out what was going on but did not get a response.  Looking around the 'net I found some discussions, a few sites said it was a DNS issue, others said that Yahoo was having hardware problems. Another guessed that it was due to power outages in California. Either way, it got me thinking how important it is for Network Operations Centers (NOCs) to keep their customers informed about the status of the service they are providing.  There are places on the 'net that list NOC phone numbers and points of contact (Jared Mauch's site is my favorite) but most do not have URLs for status sites which would be more convenient than calling an 800 number and leaving a message.  Do you run a NOC or SOC?  Do you have a web page where customers can see in near real time the status of your services?  If so, let us know via our contact page and we'll build a page off our our links page that lists the popular NOC status sites so that readers have a way to know immediately what is going on. 

Marcus Sachs
Director, SANS Internet Storm Center