Indeed.
It looks like everything either malfunctioned or was intentionally turned off all at once.
A long time ago one of my servers had a very crude monitoring system, it would send me an email every half hour saying "I'm still alive!". Hard to believe that kind of simple thing can't be implemented on a 21st century airliner ( or maybe it is, then forgive my ignorance please). A simple beep beep signal saying "I'm still flying!", every minute or so, with the plane's location as a bonus.
Edit: that said, if the plane starts breaking apart at cruising altitude, it wouldn't help much with finding it...so maybe self-powered transponders in nose, tail, wings, engines etc etc, nicely sealed in "black box" style casings might help. Or maybe they have that already and I know absolutely nothing about modern planes (or planes in general).
Planes do have that, the engines also report automatically to a ground base every thirty minutes.
The aforementioned trackers can be shut off in the cockpit, however, which seems to have happened.
It's unclear whether or not the engines actually have been reporting for hours, as Rolls Royce are apparently denying it according to some comments further up.
