You not only get tired of it, it's actually counter-productive. If I'm telling people what's wrong and how long it's going to be until it's back up, I'm not actually working on the problem.

Also, I think a lot of people tend to underestimate the sheer size of Blizzard and World of Warcraft from a technical standpoint. It's not a matter of one technician just turning in his chair and saying "it's down, be back up in about 287 minutes give or take a second". We're talking multi-tiered international managed hosting solutions on a massive scale, with probably 6-8 people between "phone jockey" and the actual "guy pressing the reset button". Hell, the BBC doesn't have anything that big.

However, I highly doubt that the forums are down because Blizzard can't handle the customer relations-side of things. It's most likely down due to the massive post-workday influx of American users all going there to ***** at the exact same time. Also, the initial outage was domain-wide...another indicator that it's not just Blizzard trying to "shut you up".