There are absolutely responses beyond "it will be fixed as soon as we can".
For clients of network services, it can be useful to know details about the scope of the outage (when did it start? who is affected? are there workarounds?). Yes, during the initial investigation there is often little to say, but even just opening up a communications channel signals to your clients that you take the outage seriously. Once a root cause has been identified, it is often possible to provide an ETA on the fix, which may take hours. Again, being able to say simply "it will be fixed in N hours" and delivering on that statement shows your clients that you know what you are doing.
Three days of outage of a externally-facing service with no communication shows that it's still amateur hour at Apple as far as network services are concerned. Full disclosure: I work for another tech company that specializes in network services, among other things.
For clients of network services, it can be useful to know details about the scope of the outage (when did it start? who is affected? are there workarounds?). Yes, during the initial investigation there is often little to say, but even just opening up a communications channel signals to your clients that you take the outage seriously. Once a root cause has been identified, it is often possible to provide an ETA on the fix, which may take hours. Again, being able to say simply "it will be fixed in N hours" and delivering on that statement shows your clients that you know what you are doing.
Three days of outage of a externally-facing service with no communication shows that it's still amateur hour at Apple as far as network services are concerned. Full disclosure: I work for another tech company that specializes in network services, among other things.