Google's service outage notifications are woeful PR fluff
"There is an issue with X affecting only 0.00Y% of customers."
"The issue is resolved for most users of X."
"The issue with X is resolved, we value your business, we hope you have warm fuzzy feelings, we strive to be awesome."
That is NOT communication with customers about an outage, that's PR BS on par with "due to higher than normal call volumes" and "your call is important to us".
I work for a large multinational, where, every time there's an outage, we put out a business outage notification through the technical operations centre, and the lead team needs to write up an "RFO" (Reason-For-Outage). Regular notifications are made to stakeholders, as the outage happens, what the symptoms are, what the outage is determined to be, when and how it's mitigated, and when and how it's resolved. It's then all written up, chapter and verse in the RFO and made available to stakeholders.
The whole "oops, but it's only affecting 0.000x%" of people thing is PR BS on par with "95% fat free" (5% fat people, do the math).. That could still be, at cloud provider scale, many, many, many people and businesses.
I accept problems happen, but geez, when they happen, enough of the fluffy "your call is important" crap.. Detail please.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
