That is one of the few things that is a mystery to everyone really. Operations are responsible for the technical running of the lists server (so mailman processes, exim and technical issues that can go wrong such as corruption, failures etc.) but are not responsible for the running of lists.wikimedia.org as a service. In the past that has fallen to Community Advocacy as they've given out list creation access and generally do off-hand tasks when needed. Though they're not the owners it seems.

No one person or team is actually responsible, it just falls to who ever is willing to work on certain things. Such as over the past few months, I have worked with Community Advocacy to create lists by delegation and for the past month, have worked with Operations on general technical maintenance and moving/upgrading the service.

I will look at this however as it does seem wrong to have a critical service where no one person or team has any 'responsibility' for it or ensures its up time as a priority other than the fallback to Operations.

John Lewis