PayPal falls over but at least it bothered to tell us

PayPal will naturally get some stick for this, and rightly so, but I think you have to give the firm some credit for the way it handled the problem and kept us all informed.

During the outage a blog on the site kept frustrated users informed with regular updates and once everything was fixed another post appeared apologising profusely and explaining what went wrong. The company's developer community got its own blog.

Compare and contrast with the way banks deal with similar problems.

I know from bitter experience how difficult it can be to get any kind of explanation from them when their Web sites fall over. As a reporter you're lucky if a spokesman answers the phone and if they do you're unlikely to get much detail. It's even more difficult for a customer, who has to spend hours on hold waiting for someone in a call centre to (maybe) explain what's going on.

Why? Do banks really think that if they hide away no one will notice and they'll be left alone?

Banks are increasingly turning to blogs, twitter and social networks in a bid to 'engage' customers and 'communicate' with them. Problem is, this generally means nothing more than transparent sales pitches and when the customer actually wants to hear from them, there's nothing but silence.