Amazon: this is the kind of explanation blog post we want from you. Please be inspired by it.
https://aws.amazon.com/message/680342/
(Ah, apparently it was only just submitted to HN about an hour ago by someone, and is about to fall off the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705067)
This is what Amazon posted during the really large outage last year (the one that still only affected multiple availability zones for at most an hour or so):
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
I can't find a link on Amazon's website, but this is a copy/paste from the explanation of a smaller outage that occurred a earlier this year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124488
Amazon's explanations are, I find, much more detailed (although this App Engine one was pretty good): when something serious goes wrong at AWS, we often not only get an apology (and a service credit), but we learn something about how distributed systems work in the process.
When we don't see explanations from Amazon is when a subset of the servers within a single availability zone (not even an entire zone) are inaccessible for less than an hour (which occasionally happens); otherwise, they honestly "kick ass" at post-mortem, as the above examples show.
However, it is my understanding that Google has had all kinds of random issues that only affected some customers that are dealt with in private, so that isn't different with them. The outage this morning, however, was "all of App Engine doesn't work anymore", something that has never even happened to AWS.
(Now, during the issue, Amazon really really sucks to the point where I'd often rather them say nothing than to keep having their front-line keep reassuring people; that said, in the middle of a crisis, most systems/people suck.)
At least they're ... consistent? =S