unscheduled outages are always painful and people will always call, I agree.
But instant compensation is doing a better job at damage control that a status page.
Keeping customer satisfaction even in bad situation is key in a world of high availability expectations.
And with a distributed, non partisan metric sourcing about the availability of an API, it's not possible for a Service Provider to lie anymore.
I don’t understand something: what kind of company is so down to the wire with cash flow that an outage requires income within seconds/minutes instead of weeks? Anyone with a financial runway so short that it can be described as “instantaneous” doesn’t sound like a customer you would want to be in business with.
The kind that will make a lot of noise as publicly as possible and create ample work for your support/admin people if you don't keep them happy...
> doesn’t sound like a customer you would want to be in business with
I could say that about most of the companies I have had the dubious pleasure of doing business with! Very few are pleasant when something goes awry even for a moment.
Feel free to give that whitepaper a look