It's certainly disheartening. These have all been power-related so far. Given the amount of money they should have spent on power systems, there's no reason this should happen. I've been to Savvis' facilities and they know exactly when a battery in their UPSes start to fail and how badly. Gensets get load tested regularly. Everything is fully redundant with instant failover. Yes, things can still go wrong, but they shouldn't be going wrong this often.
All sites are bound to go down sometime and sometimes
Yes, but when 100% uptime and fanatical support are key to your branding, even a little downtime undermines the expectations of current and prospective customers.
They set a high bar for themselves. By saying that they have the lowest downtime in the industry, more eyes are looking at them to see that they do as they say. That's what makes this such a nasty situation.
In some ways, I actually feel sorry for the team at Rackspace. This hurts them big time.