My ISP Internode always says when they expect the next status update to be. Usually there's a deadline of 2-3 hours between updates and recently there was a period of 72 hours with several cascading issues ( http://advisories.internode.on.net/item/6611/ ). There were status updates all the way through and staff communicating with users out-of-band to discover the extent of the issues so they could resolve them.