[shmatt]

IIRC status pages drive customer compensation for downtime. Updating it is basically signing the check for their biggest customers, in most similar companies you need a very senior executive to approve the update

On the other side of this, Firebase probably doesn't have money at stake making the update

[aiauthoritydev]

It is not the status page that drives customer compensation. It is downtime.

[camdenreslink]

The status page is essentially an admission of guilt. It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.

[hodgesrm]

> It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.

Is that true in this case or are you speculating? My company runs a cloud platform. Our strategy is to have outages happen as rarely as possible and to proactively offer rebates based on customer-measured downtime. I don't know why people would trust vendors that do otherwise.

[camdenreslink]

I don't have any special knowledge about the companies involved in this outage. I do know most (all?) status pages for large companies have to be manually updated and not just anybody can do that. These things impact contracts, so you want to be really sure it is accurate and an actual outage (not just a monitor going off, possibly giving a false positive).

[dpkirchner]

You are likely right, but it's still gross dishonesty. I'm not ready to let Google and their engineers off the hook for that.

[refulgentis]

Inter alia, "is essentially", "it can", tell us this is just free-associating.

We should probably avoid punishing them based on free-associating made by a random not-anonymous not-Googler not-Xoogler account on HN. (disclaimer: xoogler)

[dijit]

then it’s fucking useless. Let’s crowd source our own

[Tijdreiziger]

That’s what Downdetector is.

https://downdetector.com/

[baggy_trough]

You're in the crowdsourced version right now.

[refulgentis]

"It can", this is just free-associating, don't let it get to ya. (disclaimer: xoogler)

[shuntress]

We tried to do that. It didn't work. Too much spam, scams, and abuse.

[hugs]

working on it! (valet network)

[refulgentis]

Nah, its just some client side caching / JS stuff. Clicking the big refresh button fixed it for me, 15 minutes before OP noted it.

(n.b. as much as Google in aggregate is evil, they're smart evil. You can't avoid execs approving every outage because checks without some paper trail, and execs don't want to approve every outage, you'd have to rely on too many engineers and sales people, even as ex-employees, to keep it a secret. disclaimer: xoogler)

(EDIT: for posterity, we're discussing a "overall status" thing with a huge refresh button, right above a huge table chockful of orange triangles that indicate "One or more regions affected" - even when the "overall status" was green, the table was still full of orange and visible immediately underneath. My point being, you gotta suppose a wholeeee bunch of stuff to get to the point there was ever info suppressed, much less suppressed intentionally to avoid cutting checks)