RE: https://infosec.exchange/users/JosephMenn/statuses/112203449000985344
I always bristled at putting things that way, because taken literally it means that misleading the public is within the purview of the team. Though that might be a very academic distinction if the teams responsibility was reliability as opposed to e.g. security.
I don't think a straight up misinterpretation is the main risk here (for reasons that you mention: if someone interprets it that way the company has bigger problems). There has to be some prioritization between different kinds of potential outages for cases where you have some measure of choice. Stating things this way provides a way to prioritize them (pick one that has the lowest chance of yielding a frontpage article) that's not necessarily the intended one, and this IMO is actually somewhat likely to be picked up by totally reasonable people, especially if they are under time pressure.
