Zero directly-attributable, calculable-at-time-of-decision cost. Of course there's a cost in terms of customers who leave because of the dishonest practice, but, who knows how many people that'll be? Out of the customers who left after the outage, who knows whether they left due to not communicating status promptly and honestly or whether it was for some other reason?

Versus, if a company has X SLA contracts signed, that point to Y reimbursement for being out for Z minutes, so it's easily calculable.