[mejutoco]

IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it.

Approached in that way a status page is almost useless, since it is not reliable and only after I found out via other sources it is updated.

I am perfectly happy with a status page that shows the, mm, status of the service. Could be as easy as not reachable, slower than usual or any generic information (a traffic light). I disagree that a status page has to show the why of the error, although of course it would be nice.

[naikrovek]

> IMO the reason status pages are not updated automatically is legal. SLA and other legal contracts might change if every time something is down the status page reflects that accurately, so people try to hide it.

you are right about legal reasons; some companies count SLA by the time and date stamps on the status page.

people hiding a real outage when users know damned well there is an outage is thankfully not common at all.

if you can design and run a 100% reliable status page which never reports incorrect information, while also reporting useful information, you will be a hero to many.

[mejutoco]

> people hiding a real outage when users know damned well there is an outage is thankfully not common at all.

Thankfully people are not hiding it as in a conspiracy to pretend nothing is wrong. But, as you see in many comments in this thread, status pages rarely reflect that something is down immediately (because they are updated manually by humans).

This delay, codified in processes, is very convenient, and to me this is purposely hiding that a service is down. People are not hiding it, but the processes that control the status page are, indeed, hiding this information. This makes status pages less useful, IMO.