>Really irritating that they never update the status pages automatically, or even in a timely manor
In my experience any real status page that matters is irrelevant as soon as the powers that be become aware of it and it becomes sort of non technical and politicized. To some extent that seems almost inevitable depending on the organization.
I worked at one place where "The guy who runs the twitter account." ran a status page. Not that he knew how to do anything (The one time I know he wanted to change the page he couldn't figure out how to do it.), but he was the only one allowed to approve / make updates. But it didn't matter as he wasn't on call, nobody was quite sure who that person was from day to day. He or she was in some marketing department and their idea of a sense of urgency was "sometime this week ... maybe".
What you need is an external status page run by someone else who is monitoring. Not sure who pays for that though, maybe they can make money through ads. What you want to know is "is it down or just me?"
Mostly what happened at that large company is customers would call their sales guy, their sales guy would call me or someone who knows and we'd tell them ;)
A few customers could call me directly too, I didn't mind that, they were good folks.
It's not a good process, but it is what naturally happens.
To double-down on this, I wish companies more broadly would stop lying about their uptime on their status pages. It just creates chaos and confusion.
It also forces otherwise-honest companies to also lie about their uptime, because they don't want to be the one status page that actually shows all the little blips that naturally occur with an actively maintained product.
I wonder why they would choose not to automate updating the status page (because they 100% do automate having alarms for when things break) - maybe they think that, even with high error rates, it could be a false alarm or maybe a regional outage?
Because the more powerful parts of the business want it to look green all the time, regardless of the reality.
It would be easier to automate it. But they want to pretend that they have fewer outages than they actually do because if they were honest about how often things break, it would make them look bad in comparison with everyone else who is also lying on their status pages.
Although the initial public notice of an issue can take longer than I'd like, I don't think GCP hides or downplays their incidents the same way AWS does.
In my experience any real status page that matters is irrelevant as soon as the powers that be become aware of it and it becomes sort of non technical and politicized. To some extent that seems almost inevitable depending on the organization.
I worked at one place where "The guy who runs the twitter account." ran a status page. Not that he knew how to do anything (The one time I know he wanted to change the page he couldn't figure out how to do it.), but he was the only one allowed to approve / make updates. But it didn't matter as he wasn't on call, nobody was quite sure who that person was from day to day. He or she was in some marketing department and their idea of a sense of urgency was "sometime this week ... maybe".