We began noticing erratic behavior with some of our GCE instances at around 11:50 Pacific on the day of the outage, and Google posted a notice on their on their status page that GCE was having an outage about 30 minutes later. They also updated the status page every hour (or when they had new information), which is what they said they would do in their status updates.

While it sucks that multiple regions malfunctioned simultaneously for several hours, I can't really fault them for their communication about the issue.