Signal vs. Noise nail what makes a bad outage notification:
“One of the worst stock dummies that even I have resorted to in a moment of weakness is this terrible non-apology: ‘We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused’. Oh please.”
This puts me in mind of Joel Spolsky’s take on what makes a good one:
“… we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we’re doing to prevent that problem in the future.”
I want every site I use as a service to do this. Not one of the systems I’ve experienced which were supposed to tell me about outages have ever done the job properly.