The stats are simply to provide some context. I agree criticism is centered around communication/PR, but also seems to imply the outage was of the same magnitude or worse than GCE's global outage, which is inaccurate. Per HA best practices, multi-region load balancing or failover would have adverted downtime during this event, whereas it would not have during the global GCE outage. Had this been a global outage, I think the postmortem and customer outreach would have been much better.