You would be more in control of your holiday airliner trip if you were allowed to fly the plane instead of the qualified pilot, that might not be a good thing though.
Visibility of the issue is dependent on knowing what the problem is. When outages are only an hour to two long, would you rather the technician spend the time communicating the issue or fixing it? This problem exists whether your technician is working locally or as part of a cloud service.
But unfortunately (though not unexpectedly), the help desk is just as much in the dark as I am. They can't tell me: who it affects, how widespread it is, when it will be fixed, or even what the issue is. I wonder if "large" companies or organizations that use Google Apps get better support or have priority support in some way to get such information.
Although, my account seems to be working again, so that's good to know.