[VyseofArcadia]

When anything on that page turns not-green, there are news stories about it. Not positive ones. So exec approval is needed, because the decision to flip something on that page is ultimately the decision to cause stories negative to MS to be published. The exec has to weigh whether pissing off the customers (by failing to acknowledge reality) is worth the bad press and SLA fallout.

[ctvo]

It has nothing to do with press. This is negative press already, and journalist can use this to write their stories without waiting for the official light to go from green to yellow.

It's about contractual obligations and SLAs. Things are not officially down in most agreements until MSFT acknowledges they're down. Refunds issued because your blob storage failed to meet 99.9999 uptime to your largest customers are directly tied to these statuses.

[Enginerrrd]

I'm not going out of my way to be hyperbolic or anything here, but that sounds suspiciously like "fraud" to me.

[ctvo]

I don't think they're committing fraud.

I think it's an important enough page that it can't be automated. It needs a manual approval from a human, for the very basics, like even if the status reporting system is operating correctly, because of various downstream effects.

[PenguinCoder]

Which means it's not a status page any more. Defeating the supposed purpose.

[cutemonster]

"SLA refund page"?