[duxup]

>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".

[quickthrower2]

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?"

[duxup]

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.