Similar to where I work a few months back...
<colo outage, all database monitoring tools have flatlined or are flashing red. Customer calls start coming in to Tech Support>
Management to TS> Don't communicate on a downtime to clients!!! No global information email must be sent. Tell the customers that you have an "exceptional situation that only affects them" if they call
TS> There is no current known problem. Everything is working just fiiiiiine... Oh, really? Let me check. Hum, there may be an exceptional slowdown at the moment though, I can see your account is a bit slow. We'll keep you informed <trollface.jpg>
Cust 2>My system is down
TS>There is no current problem we can see, monitoring seems good <iLied.jpg>
<...snip...>
Cust 96> I called 20 minutes ago, your exceptionnal and temporary problem is a lie, my friends also use your service, and they are up shit creek too...
TS to Management> Can we make a bloody customer mailing to tell them there is an outage FFS, keep everyone informed, if not happy? We are in meltdown here with 35 mails and 90 calls in 40 minutes and we only have 300 customers in this country!
20 minutes later, get the OK for a mail to all clients that a "temporary problem" affecting a "small amount of users" for "10 minutes" and that it "happned due to elements out of our control at our ISP" (aka, admins stuffed a planned upgrade that was not tested before or at least deployed on one machine at a time in a rolling upgrade rather than all at once).
Looks like LastPass took a page out of our management's support handling policy
AC because even if this is no longer management policy following a buyout, it's frowned upon talking about it.
Even so, telling the customer's the truth does not hurt (much), and it's easier to tell the truth than remember continual lies about the uptime and availability SLA's...