I've been on the other side of this wall, though not for anything near this large of a service.
A lot of shops run with minimal staff, because -- let's face it -- cost is a very large factor of competition in the hosting industry.
Then a problem occurs, and if it were an easy problem to solve, they'd just solve it straight off and then do damage control in PR. Or, the problem is more like this one, and it requires some hard and fast thinking on the part of the staff that are available.
If you're one of those staff, the last thing you want to do is distract yourself by logging in to a forum every twenty minutes, or checking email, or writing status updates every thirty minutes. You instead feel incredible pressure to get the problem fixed immediately, meaning you don't even stop for a bathroom break if you can help it.
As a sysadmin, you'll also justify your decisions by saying that telling the users what's going on won't really change anything; it's not like they're assisting you in troubleshooting. Even if they're intelligent, they still aren't familiar with the specific systems and network topology and other good stuff involved in your operations, so you'll probably spend a lot more time answering their suggestions than you would if you just got in and figured it out yourself.
Though as a user, that kind of attitude is extremely frustrating.
You have an excellent point because I too host websites for hundreds of people and have been in the middle of a disaster. It's hard to keep updating a blog, but I got around to it about every hour regardless. Usually it just said what I was working on and that nothing had changed. Two sentences, but everyone knew what was going on. I also changed my outgoing voice mail recording which helped a ton. Most people didn't even leave messages.
It's REALLY hard, but well worth it in the end because you get praise for your communication instead of hate mail for abandoning your customers.
Things just really don't work on human time/relationship scales anymore, especially when it comes to internet services. Communications can move in milliseconds now, diagnosing and fixing complex issues is still on the order of hours/years/lifetimes!
It doesn't help that your customers often know about issues you are having before you do. So say ~30min to get notified of an issue (Which is not unrealistic for a non obvious issue that isn't something you actively monitor) - Quick 10min investigation to assess what the scale of the issue is, another 3-5min to post a couple notifications, and that is the better part of a hour gone, and you haven't even got around to trying to come up with a fix.
A lot of shops run with minimal staff, because -- let's face it -- cost is a very large factor of competition in the hosting industry.
Then a problem occurs, and if it were an easy problem to solve, they'd just solve it straight off and then do damage control in PR. Or, the problem is more like this one, and it requires some hard and fast thinking on the part of the staff that are available.
If you're one of those staff, the last thing you want to do is distract yourself by logging in to a forum every twenty minutes, or checking email, or writing status updates every thirty minutes. You instead feel incredible pressure to get the problem fixed immediately, meaning you don't even stop for a bathroom break if you can help it.
As a sysadmin, you'll also justify your decisions by saying that telling the users what's going on won't really change anything; it's not like they're assisting you in troubleshooting. Even if they're intelligent, they still aren't familiar with the specific systems and network topology and other good stuff involved in your operations, so you'll probably spend a lot more time answering their suggestions than you would if you just got in and figured it out yourself.
Though as a user, that kind of attitude is extremely frustrating.