Sadly this is a common situation. They appear to hold off making any public notice (including often on their own "service dashboards") until support forums are screaming with upset users.
Google App Engine has had numerous outages like this, the only one I can find any public documentation for being a 6 hour outage in 2012: http://googleappengine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/about-todays-a... (and let's not forget the old-style Datastore corruption incident, where every App Engine user got to manually merge split-brain database tables after a messed up failover)
Since the team highlights basically anything that looks like it is impacting customers, the issues don't always warrant a stand-alone blog post, but you'll notice that generally speaking the last post in each thread is a full public post-mortem with diagnosis and remediation.
Let me know if there's more you think might be useful for you as a GAE customer. Thanks!
I'm not trying to be evil but I used to migrate a small website away from GAE because of continuing issues and very limited communication from Google.
Azure isn't perfect but their support is way more responsive, at least to us eventhough we don't have any fancy support contract. Eventhough my GAE experience was 2-3 yrs ago, I have to say that Azure has way less issues.
Google App Engine has had numerous outages like this, the only one I can find any public documentation for being a 6 hour outage in 2012: http://googleappengine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/about-todays-a... (and let's not forget the old-style Datastore corruption incident, where every App Engine user got to manually merge split-brain database tables after a messed up failover)