At my company we always heir on the side of transparency and liberally post to our status. subdomain whenever an issue is identified.

Recently, our Redis cluster failed and both master & slave host machines rebooted.

This caused a latency spike in our app, from roughly a 70ms to 400ms response time for less than 10 minutes.

We posted to status within 60 seconds and posted 3 updates within those 10 minutes.

The next day, a new customer (who hadn't gone live with the app yet) cancelled their subscription because the app was "not reliable".

I guess my point is that there is a balance to strike. Our customers are not tech-savvy in any way and treat any small issue as the end of the world. Maybe there's no need to freak people out for a minutes-long latency spike.