[shpxnvz]

Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call.

It's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Are you really suggesting that the entire 180 minutes of effort by multiple engineers would have to be directed at writing a "happy email" rather than fixing the problem?

The real reason, I imagine, is that if they automatically sent out an email to everyone who could be affected then more people would know of the problem. It's probably smart to accept a handful of customers being unhappy about being in the dark in return for the outage being exposed to far fewer customers.