This is in large scale finance and/or investment sectors where it is immeasurably important to keep clients (both "those paying us" but also the "those integrating with us" types) well informed of progress so as not to cause market panic.
Sometimes communicating is worth it for interrupting the team.
Perhaps, but the first thing any emergency responder will tell you is that there should be one incident commander, and that all communication and allocation of resources should go through that one person. And that the person with the incident commander role should not carry out any operational duties besides coordinate and control, because those other tasks require the same mental faculties, but use them in a different way, making them less effective in either.
If there is a requirement to update customers affected by an incident, the company should have processes in place to streamline the flow of information without interrupting the team. And the team responsible for updating customers should only communicate with the incident commander, and absolutely steer clear of the operational responders. If specific details are required, it falls to the incident commander to gather those details from the team, not to outside people running interference.
Unfortunately, that means the observer has to be able to understand and follow what the engineers are doing while staying out of the way as much as possible. Tricky, but something you really need if for no other reason than to communicate and look for any holes that the team/person working the problem may not have thought of in the interim.
If the main engineer has a 'family emergency' your communication engineer has enough context to take over, while another engineer is assigned to communication.
Smaller companies though are a bit less structured, and have to wing it a bit more depending on circumstances.
If you need constant updates from someone who knows the subject material, you need to nominate a single person who knows the material to take point on communication. They can help in between communication updates, but they can’t be tasked with leading or owning the work.
The worst way to do it is to have a manager who can’t understand the subject material themselves, then let them interrupt the entire team over and over again. Then the team has to stop and educate the manager about what needs to be communicated so they can relay it to someone else.
Having non-technical managers relaying information back and forth from the entire team is always a mistake.
If your target is to get update every hour you just dedicate a person during incident to communicate with the "outside" and make rest of the team post the updates on shared chat, which you want anyway if you don't want people to get on eachother's toes