They should take a few mins out of their weekend to update the dashboard regardless. If my small 25 employee company can do it Google can do it.

See my other comment, to say what, exactly?

That's yes, it's still being investigated?

Yeah why not? A billion dollar cloud provider can't have one person communicating to customers that are facing multi day outage. That not updating is an option is absurd in that time range.

Yes precisely. At least with a new timestamp we will then know the status dashboard isn't also broken.

At a smaller, less corporate company the engineer/public comms person dividing line would not be so ossified the divide couldn't be bridged when the situation called for it.

I think the broader point here is that they (whomever they is) don't think the situation calls for it. That's why they said the next update would be on Monday on Friday.

You may feel that's a bad decision, but I doubt that people are in a panic because they can't push out an update that would not be noticably different from the last one.

Just to clarify, what should this update contain?

>Just to clarify, what should this update contain?

"We're working on it", possibly an ETA for a fix or some details. Technically it's fluff but people are not machines and the update is for people. We like the feeling that people are working on a fix, that people care and that the end is in sight. It makes the situation less stressful and, as for why Google should care, less stressed engineers won't bad mouth Google as much after the fact.

Compare Amazon's responses during their S3 outage: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/ (toward the bottom)

What's the better communication plan: detailed, hourly updates or terse, one-line blog posts scattered across several days?

I think this comes down to the two outages being not at all similar. An s3 outage affects practically every Amazon customer. This affects a relatively small number of go customers.

And I'm confused about what was good about that response. That article is about how the s3 outage caused so many issues that Amazon couldn't update their status dashboard to inform users at all.