Its tempting to publish snippets of your monitoring results onto your status page, but is this information easy to understand?

Recently, I was sat reading a providers service status update which said

"We're investigating an issue impacting inbound email ticket creation for customers in our West Coast data center"

A few hours later another update for a separate issue appeared

"Our US-Midwest data center may be experiencing an outage. Our operations team is aware and taking steps to fix"

As a customer, i'm completely unaware of how they choose to load balance their application across the globe. I don't really know if these outages are affecting the service I subscribe to from the UK or not.

Focus on how it’s effecting your users, not your datacenters

Explain clearly what effects I’m likely to see, will this prevent me from logging in? Will the emails my clients are sending me be lost forever or just delayed?

The technical specifics of your problems mean very little - however the way it affects me personally means a lot.