GitLab team member here. We're aware of the incident and the status page has been updated. We will provide further updates on the status page as they become available.
(Edited now that the status page has been updated).
Your impression is correct. We use GitLab.com and notice these incidents as they happen.
The delay in updating status is a result of our Incident Management process [0]. We have a Communications Manager on Call (CMOC) who leads communication throughout an incident. One of their responsibilities includes updating the status page. The slight delay between noticing the issue and updating the status page is a result of the time it takes for the CMOC to get alerted, assess the situation, and write the communication that is shared on the status page.
I'm not sure how the "updated a few seconds ago" messages are generated but I'll try to find out once the incident has been resolved.
Not a "status page" then, but merely "a page where Communications Manager post messages on after assessing the situation and consulting/getting permission from management"
After you notice I assume you have to declare an incident, get a call going, assess the extent of the issues, get the needed people involved, and then you'd announce on the status page. 13 minutes isn't amazing but it also isn't terrible. Perhaps you have better ways of keeping status pages updated much faster while also not ending up ramping up the posting of false positives.
It doesn't matter if each individual detects the outage because they'll start blame at the local source and move further up the tree rather than assign blame to a full system failure right off the bat. 99.9% of the time it's going to be a local failure affecting the individual.
Also, most alerting systems like check multiple times before declaring a public outage, many times 2 to 3 failures some seconds apart are needed.