I call bullshit on this bullshit. When my systems go down, I AM sorry if it inconveniences my users. Why is this not OK? It beats the hell out of some stupid-ass whale picture.
I see a certain dichotomy when it comes to the times when things go wrong: from an provider's point of view, downtime is an inconvenience because they now have to deal with an angry client, but from a client perspective, it looks more like the provider is irresponsible and incompetent, than a mere inconvenience (especially when there's money or job security on the line for the client party).
Then again, I think being cold and going for the "we apologize for any inconvenience" line can have some advantages over being personal - it implies you are more objective and reliable.
If you're dealing with a system outage affecting hundreds or thousands of users, it's probably impossible to say anything else but generics ("inconvenience", "issues", etc.).
Just say what went wrong, how you're dealing with it now and in the future, and what you're doing to make it up to everyone that was (potentially) affected.
If someone writes back with a specific incident caused by the outage, you can address it directly then.
All my emails tend to be formal in style even to people I know well - so I would never consider it appropriate to write 'really, really sorry about that guys' to customers.
