It's often used as an escalation point when people can't get support from certain companies (most notably, Google). If an employee lurks in here and sees your post, they might contact the right people to fix your issue.

Smaller companies also do a lot of PR damage control and constantly monitor HN for threads complaining about their services.

You're not wrong but that's how it works.

That's not what happened here. We're talking about an outage that was resolved days ago, long before this thread went up.

> But HN is not a customer service forum ?

you must be new here ;-)