In September, Google experienced a services disruption that affected nearly a third of Gmail users. As you’d expect, it generated quite a bit of news. Such outages are fairly infrequent, but even Google struggled to resolve it. The Google status dashboard during that outage simply said “indicates some type of issue.”
Imagine yourself, now, in the shoes of an IT administrator relaying the status of a widespread email outage to your boss. How satisfied do you think your boss would be with the statement that “something’s wrong and we’re looking into it,” if that’s all the information you could provide? Worse yet, what if you didn’t even provide that information until after your boss spent the last hour trying to figure out why email wasn’t getting through?