You would not accept to have a non-functional service for a couple of months from anyone else either if you'll be honest with it.
First off, the article headline:
> Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days
You:
> You would not accept to have a non-functional service for a couple of months from anyone else
Is five days acceptable? Probably not, no. Is five days remotely the same as "a couple of months"? No, and you know it, so knock it off.
And what people are pointing out is that even though "shut down my account" and "had a maintenance issue that made my account unavailable" obviously have the same effect -- you can't get to your account, and that's bad -- the two phrases carry very different semantic meaning. If I say "my Twitter account isn't working", what you take away from it is going to be very different than if I say "Twitter locked me out of my account". In this article's case, the headline says one thing and the article says another.
Nobody is saying it's just fine if you can't get to your iCloud account for five days if Apple screws something up. Nobody is defending Apple's bad communication here. Historically, not even the most enthusiastic Mac fans have ever once said "You know what Apple is great at? Cloud services." What we're saying is criticize them for the right thing.
1 users had serious issue but it was handled like some low priority, it took a long time to fix too so either was a serious issue or it really was a low priority thing
2 rubbing the shitty TOS in the face of an upset customer is a terrible idea, I stopped giving money to companies that id that to me.
3 Apple did not apologize or offer to compensate for the time the user paid for a service that Apple did not delivered, this is typical Apple where only a judge can make them admit blame and do the right/legal thing.