For the second time in recent memory, I've had trouble reaching one or more of the linodes I manage, and for the second time I've been unable to reach Linode's site to check status or file a trouble ticket.

I don't like downtime, but it happens. When it happens though, I'd really don't like being in the dark and I don't like having to tell my "customers" "yeah, things have been down 15 minutes but I still have no status to report." It would be really great if Linode took advantage of their presence in multiple datacenters to make it possible for us to at least have an easy way to at least check on system status.

Until then, I've added your phone number to my phone, but I don't imagine I'm going to have too much luck even getting to a recorded status message the next time there is an outage that effects multiple Xen hosts.

I agree with what eas said. I didn't have the server name for the IRC channel when the site went down and I was under the gun from clients to some status updates.

Sounds like you and I were both bitten by this issue:
http://linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4908
which for some reason doesn't show up in the RSS feed, or the "Forum Posts" part of the Community page, and is locked so that no replies can be posted.

This is another illustration of the need for something like "linodeemergency.com", which would be hosted completely outside Linode's infrastructure, and would be the official channel for outage information from Linode to its customers.

My Linode was basically unreachable, and since linode.com was in the same boat, I couldn't check the forums and I couldn't file a support ticket. I was completely in the dark.

Update: that Forum thread is no longer locked; apparently that was temporary to make sure only accurate information was posted while they were still investigating.

I find http://twitter.com/linode to be a pretty good place to find quick out-of-band updates.

Good to know!

I did check there a few times and didn't see any updates.