Poorly Announced Site Maintenance

Whereas the AdWords blog said this:

This just in from our tech team:

We will be performing AdWords maintenance from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. PST tomorrow – Tuesday, January 9, 2007. While all AdWords advertisements will continue to run as normal and you will be able to log into your account, you may not be able to run or retrieve reports, or upload image or video ads during this time.

We apologize for the short notice and any inconvenience this may cause you.

The normal notice within AdWords did not appear! Consequently my staff, and presumably thousands of AdWords advertisers who do not happen to frequent the AdWords blog, had no idea why the system was slow and why reporting was not working...

Google needs to either make a subscription to the Adwords blog compulsory for advertisers, or stop using it as the sole source of really important information...

Of course this is probably just a glitch due to Google not having key staff working during weekends and holiday periods....