Downtime sucks, regardless of whether it’s planned or not. As a user, when you visit a site to complete a task but you can’t because it’s down, you’re frustrated. Whether or not the site put up a cutesy banner a week earlier warning you about the downtime isn’t really relevant. Banner or not, you can’t complete your task.

Production issues and bugs are a common albeit frustrating part of software development. Imagine a tale of two organizations, with different approaches towards addressing this problem.