Tonight for about a full hour many Rackspace sites, including their own Slicehost service, inquisitr.com, Laughing Squid-hosted sites, Posterous, Tr.im, and even my own SocialToo.com.  Ben Parr of Mashable even noticed, asking if a bunch of websites has all just crashed.  I was reminded to check the status of my own site by a few posts by Duncan Riley on FriendFeed.com/Twitter, followed by a blog post of his own.  That prompted me to realize my entire site had been down for over an hour, which prompted me to check their Twitter account, which prompted me to check their status blog that gave a few more details.

This got me thinking – why are services so reliant on Twitter to get the word out to their customers?  Have we gotten that lazy? In the past a service with “Fanatical Support” would have sent out a brief e-mail to their customers notifying them of the update.  Do they just expect all their customers to be checking every single one of their Twitter updates?  I have to admit as a customer I’m a bit disappointed.

I don’t mean to pick on just Rackspace though