Big companies persist in corporate-speak even though everyone hates it. I never have understood why. They must think that it's the best way to go, somehow.
I don't think everyone hates it. On a site like this obviously the cool thing is to claim to prefer startup-style error messages like "oops, everything's fucked, sorry dude". But fashions change fast; a big company writing in that style would (by the time they'd approved the procedures) likely come off like your parents trying to sound cool by using the hip phrases they've read about.
And that's without even getting into how older people (the HN readership is overwhelmingly, unrepresentatively young) tend to care a lot more about politeness.
There are plenty of good alternatives out there besides useless lawyer-speak and profanity-filled startup-speak. It is possible to write a message which is polite, official, and doesn't sound like it came from a robot.
It's the legal department. Each public statement has to be carefully evaluated for its potential to open up lawsuits or bad press. The neutral, robotic tone with ambiguous statements is absolutely required to protect them from the masses.
The unintended effect (for me at least) is that sentence stands out and I pay less attention to the poor excuse written directly before it. A bit like the way a politician does not answer a question.
