Even better: https://developers.facebook.com/status/

I understand and agree that those are great options, but it's also nice to be able to discuss a downtime, especially if it's a particularly long one, at least for me. Plus, with how many articles I'm not interested in that would make it to the front page, just having one that's removed when a major service is back online doesn't seem too inhibiting to me.

I go to Hacker News during major downtimes because it's the most likely place I can visit to find a real technical explanation for why a site is encountering problems. This site is so closely connected to Silicon Valley, it's not uncommon for "inside story" information to get posted here that's not posted in the media.

Discussing downtime events also holds practical value. If we are affected by the outage, having a news entry about downtime on hacker news allows us to share to one another useful information regarding how to respond to it.