To be clear, usually there’s an approval gate. Something is generated automatically but a product or business person has to actually approve the alert going out. Behind the scenes everyone internal knows shit is on fire (unless they have shitty monitoring, metrics, and alerting which is true for a lot of places but not major cloud or SaaS providers).

You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.

IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.

There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.

Speaking from 10+ YoE developing metrics, dashboards, uptime, all that shit and another 5+ on top of that at an exec level managing all that, this is bullshit. There is a disconnect between the automated systems that tell us something is down and the people that want to tell the outside world something is down. If you are a small company, there’s a decent chance you’ve launched your product without proper alerting and monitoring so you have to manually manage outages. If you are GitHub or AWS size, you know exactly when shit hits the fan because you have contracts that depend on that and you’re going to need some justification for downtime. Assuming a healthy environment, you’re doing a blameless postmortem but you’ve done millions of those at that scale and part of resolving them is ensuring you know before it happens again. Internally you know when there is an outage; exposing that externally is always about making yourself look good not customer experience.

What you’re describing is the incident management process. That also doesn’t require management input because you’re not going to wait for some fucking suit to respond to a Slack message. Your alarms have severities that give you agency. Again, small businesses sure you might not, but at large scale, especially with anyone holding anything like a SOC2, you have procedures in place and you’re stopping the bleeding. You will have some level of leadership that steps in and translates what the individual contributors are doing to business speak; that doesn’t prevent you from telling your customers shit is fucked up.

The only time a company actually needs to properly evaluate what’s going on before announcing is a security incident. There’s a huge difference between “my honeypot blew up” and “the database in this region is fucked so customers can’t write anything to it; they probably can’t use our product.” My honeypot blowing up might be an indication I’m fucked or that the attackers blew up the honeypot instead of anything else. Can’t send traffic to a region? Literally no reason the customer would be able to so why am I not telling them?

I read your response as either someone who knows nothing about the field or someone on the business side who doesn’t actually understand how single panes of glass work. If that’s not the case, I apologize. This is a huge pet peeve for basically anyone in the SRE/DevOps space who consumes these shitty status pages.

Then you hit the 10% of the time where I reboot for kernel updates lmao