I must be terribly naive or hopelessly optimistic. The immediate reason I thought of that would explain why stories like this are upvoted is for a matter of vis

I must be terribly naive or hopelessly optimistic. The immediate reason I thought of that would explain why stories like this are upvoted is for a matter of visibility, and in a distant second place, to head off questions like "Is it broken for you, too?" Judging by a cursory review of the comment here, I suspect that reasoning is fairly common. It strikes me as awfully pessimistic to immediately assume someone's clicking their mouse thinking "Haha, Gmail is down! Take THAT Google! >upvote<" when the result is very real service disruption for a lot of people.