This is the classic case of "working hard to fix things when they should be spending a little more time updating clients and being descriptive about the problem."
I've been involved with so many down-time instances with web hosts and web service providers that I can tell you the #1 thing that pisses people off is the lack of communication - MORE THAN THE DOWNTIME ITSELF!
If they could tell us some technical, but not too revealing, details, that would be great. Then those of us with experience can guess what the time frame will ACTUALLY be to fix the problem, while others can at least get the feeling that they getting to the bottom of the problem.
I'll be the contrary voice. At this point, I don't really care what the cause of the downtime is and I'd prefer that their engineers are working full time on fixing it, rather than writing extended blog posts about it. If they have a solid ETA on a fix, that might be nice to know, but from my experience it's unusual to be able to give such a number with confidence. After the fact, maybe there is an interesting story to tell about what went wrong and how they hope to avoid it in the future, but that's for tomorrow not today.
First having a page like this where I can make sure I'm not the issue is helpful and I can be somewhat comforted there.
However, now that I've discovered the issue doesn't exist between my ass and my keyboard I'd also like some sort of idea on the depth of the issue and a timeframe for a fix.
Don't make me read a wall of text to get a simple answer to "is it down?", but clue me in on what's going on and, if possible, when I can expect service to resume.
Dropbox isn't critical for us where I work, but it is something we use daily for passing documents around.
I respect your opinion, but what I mean is that seeing something along the lines of "replacing a router", or "re-establishing communications with AWS", or whatever it happens to be, is better than "it's down".
There also has to be a couple people there that aren't hands on with the problem, and their responsibility could easily be to constantly communicate with the public.
Well the persons that are sitting back not doing anything would still have to talk to someone who knows what is going on to ask them anyway.
Also, it seems you're never going to be able to give out enough info to please everyone in these circumstances so you give out just enough like they did.
Agreed, when I saw this status page I let out a slight sigh of relief seeing a straight forward "currently down" "working normally" site, instead of a series of blog entries ala twitter and tumblr.
It's nice that you want to write, but for the love of God get back to work.
