> it's just been extremely difficult to take our people off of mitigation long enough to write something more coherent
This always rings hollow to me, and yet I hear it over and over.
A company like Linode surely has at least a dozen people who can be on call in a situation like this, probably much more. All it takes is for one engineer or even a product person... Heck a technically-minded support person could listen in on the war room meetings and get enough information to post something better than "we're fixing it".
5 minutes of blogging every six hours would be plenty.
And yet, people always claim it's impossible and there's no time. Frankly I find it frightening... If you are coding that fast that no one on your team has five minutes to step aside, take a breather after six hours of coding and summarize what the team just spent the last six hours doing, I shudder to think what kind of panicked alarmist interventions you are making.
There's no excuse for silence. There just isn't. It's a gross failure on the part of management to prioritize the responsibilities they have to your customers customers. Full stop. Sure, the engineers can't be expected to remember to tap out to blog. But if that's the extent of the accountability structures you can assemble during a crisis, that is a serious organizational failing, particularly for an organization the size of Linode.