I've been notified for what amounted to two minutes of downtime before (my VPS is in the London data centre). Are you in the Fremont data centre? That is where this outage was.
Yes, I have a machine in Fremont. How were you notified? Email?
Yes. An email about unexpected downtime, then another two minutes later saying the downtime was over.
Hmm, I don't see any way in my Linode account settings to disable these emails, and I never received any! That is disconcerting. :(