As we reach day 12 of the Cellcom outage, I want to introduce (or reintroduce) a word that has been popular with the children for the past few years.

“Ghosted”

It means believing you have a solid relationship with someone, only to have them disappear from your life without explanation. Normally, it applies to brief romances or friendships.

Never did we ever think it could apply to a telecommunications company.

But over the past 12 days, there have been periods where Cellcom has ghosted us.

Two periods of silence that lasted for 48 hours.

One stretch that went on for three days.

All of those occasions ended with only a blurb on social media. Followed by more waiting.

When communications professionals return to study the Cellcom crisis, it’s the near silence from the company that took an already horrendous situation and made it much worse.

Almost two weeks ago, when the outage began, Cellcom began with messages of positivity and empathy. It wasn’t Shakespeare and it certainly didn’t make customers feel better, but it demonstrated an effort to try to keep the dialog rolling.

Now, we’re simply listening for a pulse. Or worse, the Cellcom sympathizers, which at this point includes mostly contrarians who are trying to fill the void with aggravating noise that helps nothing but their egos and starvation for attention.

Now, we are dealing with a cyber attack. Cellcom may be limited with what they’re allowed to disclose. Fine. They could still be educating us with a broad view of what they’ve done in the past to prepare for this crisis, or informational graphics of ways customers can still get into touch with loved ones.

Anything is better than what we’ve gotten over the past week. And that’s mostly nothing.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.