What I don't understand is this: Why do companies (like four square, twitter, etc) wait until after their first multi-hour crash before instituting a "this is how we'll communicate to users when we have downtime" process? I would assume that everyone has learned from twitter's historical mistakes at this point. I would argue that startups -- especially startups that deal with large numbers of transactions per day -- start with code and policies for communicating downtime issues first and launch the product second.
It's not part of a minimum viable product. When you're trying to get something out the door, your downtime communication is not your top priority, so you can afford to improve it later.
Agreed. And they did use their Twitter accounts to communicate the problem/downtime (which even MVP's should have & use for status communications). You can be sure their status.foursquare.com blog won't have any more information than their Twitter accounts when they have unexpected downtime in the future.
