Considering that every major corporation suffers network reachability issues every year (hacking, DDoS), it's not so bad when Steem suffers a downtime. The most important thing is having alert engineers and developers capable of analyzing, pinpointing and fixing the problem within a few hours. I've seen this many times since being a witness, wether it was hardfork transitions or blockchain bugs/attacks. I have nothing but praise to the whole Steem family.
I've read a few bitchings here and there during the HF freeze, it often comes from the same people who bring little value to the ecosystem. To them I say, instead of whining, do something constructive next time, it's your blockchain too, remember that.
I still stumble upon Reddit going down and I'm not even there as much as pre-steem. There will always be bitchings, worst one was when Steemit was being DDOSed for many days that one time and a tweet was saying how they are "losing money" because of it. It was baffling on so many levels it became funny, hence I remember it so well.