Successful cowboy outfit
The update they posted to Twitter and to Facebook long after the problem first occurred was subsequently deleted once an angry mob of customers - presumably unable to get through on support lines, which weren't working either - started laying into them.
While their uptime has improved, their customer service has always been lower than whale shit, worsened by the fact you can't understand what their offshore slaves are saying as they parrot lines from the scripts on their screens. And in any case, during such outages it has been impossible to contact them anyway.
You just need to look at their naff advertising to realise 1&1 are now primarily a marketing company. A marketing company prunes negative customer feedback; a marketing company keeps its fingers crossed that any actual downtime is swiftly rectified so they have no need of tarnishing their status page with anything useful.
In fact, the 1&1 status page at status.oneandone.co.uk currently says:
All systems functional
Last updated at 04.08.2011
So much for German efficiency.