In this case, I'm not sure it matters what it says or how your non-technical friends interpret it. The site is down. Why it is down doesn't change the next thing casual viewers will do (close the tab).

But it does matter to their opinion of the site: is it down because the author took it down, is it down due to a technical problem, or is it is it down because the hosting provider took it down?

"This deployment is temporarily paused", if anything, sounds like the people who put the site up took it down again. That sends the wrong message.

Personally, if my hosting provider took my post down, I'd want them to make that obvious to my visitors. Or at the very least make it look like a technical issue. Not make it look like I took it down.

> The site is down.

Is it? The title is "The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock". For all I know, it's a joke about what deadlock looks like for robots, showing what could be interpreted as a deadlock in a webserver. At a glance, I can't tell if the site is down, or if it's up and correctly showing its very short message.

So, yeah, in reality, I'm 99% sure it really is an error message. That's only because I've seen similar error messages in the past and can infer how to interpret it.