OP is talking about kicking someone when they are down as the result of a random catastrophe. You won't gain many customers doing this, and the ones you do gain won't be very loyal.
So perhaps what I’m saying is that at some point you have to kick when down, at least if a vendor is always down. Every marketing campaign I’ve ever been involved in ran for longer than 2 weeks. And in my example I was not joking - we were paying for a service that had roughly bi-weekly, unplanned downtime of multiple hours, for many many months. A marketing campaign would have inevitably run concurrent with a downtime.
I agree - running attack ads after 1 random catastrophic event is in poor taste. But at some point - 3 in a year?, 3 in a month? - it becomes reasonable, and tasteful, to tout uptime as an advantage.
I don't think anyone's really disagreeing with this. If you can make a real case that you can offer a better service, that's fine.
As another example: say a meteorite takes out your competitor's data centre. If you are running from independent data centres with capacity to handle a sudden failure of one, feel free to highlight that. If you're running from one data centre, you should probably just count yourself lucky that it happened to them and not you.
