All I'm really looking to see when a site is down is:

"The site is down, we're aware, we're working on it."

Even better would be an estimated time for fix and a brief description of the problem, but that's a nice-to-have rather than a necessary.

For example, when the board was down this morning, I couldn't remember whether it was scheduled maintenance or not... A simple line would have revealed all. ("Someone tripped on the power cord." "Randy spilled coffee into the server again.") That sort of thing...