I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on down

I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on downtime of a Google Labs product in 2004, you'd see an accelerated response, but that Google doesn't exist anymore. The most I could see is some people from Google commenting here to give some slightly more technical than average canned response in order to flatter potential recruits. (And even that is so unlikely that I wouldn't assume any Google employees commenting here are doing that unless they gave the game away somehow.)