By design. If it was a good faith attempt to report status, it would be automatically updated from a flock of canaries instead of through a slow, political process.
Even that would be meaningless at the scale of AWS.
"A top of rack switch let out the blue smoke and it'll be ~30 before we can re-rack it" would impact what fraction of a fraction of a percent of canaries? Irrelevant to me, unless of course my VM lives on a box backed by that switch. ;)
The status dashboard exists for us to laugh at when things break and to convince C*Os that everything is fine. That's it.
Ehhh... the ratio of "bump in the night" problems that affect just me to genuine outages that cross regions and affect others is about 1:1, and then about 1 in 4 or 5 of the cross-region problems blow up to the scale where they feel forced to update the dashboard. So I disagree, I think a canary flock would be both meaningful and useful.
As you point out, though, the status dashboard isn't truly meant to be either of those things. I don't have any illusions about it ever changing.
"A top of rack switch let out the blue smoke and it'll be ~30 before we can re-rack it" would impact what fraction of a fraction of a percent of canaries? Irrelevant to me, unless of course my VM lives on a box backed by that switch. ;)
The status dashboard exists for us to laugh at when things break and to convince C*Os that everything is fine. That's it.