At the scale of DigitalOcean (~10k physical nodes), Amazon (>250k physical nodes) or Google this seems wholly unreasonable, there's a definite signal to noise r

At the scale of DigitalOcean (~10k physical nodes), Amazon (>250k physical nodes) or Google this seems wholly unreasonable, there's a definite signal to noise ratio issue because there will be hundreds of failures per day in any large infrastructure, some of which will have customer impact (ranging from minor to major). It's a statistical reality. A lot of the other suggestions seem to centre around extending your status page to be more personal to the end user, this is (to some extent) the route Amazon AWS has taken in allowing you to see which instances are scheduled for retirement (because they lack live migration capability, a la GCE), etc. I note that Amazon now sends out maintenance e-mails advising when certain IPsec connections will go down for them to perform upgrades, this is also great, and others should copy. This leaves the 'globally visible' bit (i.e. http://status.aws.amazon.com/ http://status.aws.amazon.com/) for critical outages affecting a large proportion of your customers.