Although I like the concept at this point status pages are very disappointing to me, between those that stay green when everything is failing because they're not updated properly, those that stay green because "it was a localized partial failure only" even though the whole thing breaks (hi aws !), ... Sure some are reliable, but enough aren't that it feels like you can't trust them.
You can't look at the status page and believe what it says, so you go and ask people anyway (on irc, reddit, hnews, whatever community you like). Meaning that page might as well not have existed.
Couldn’t agree more. I pushed for one to be implemented at my last job (api) as I felt it was ridiculous that we didn’t have a means to communicate downtime, outages, issues.
Initially the status page worked. But as more and more people subscribed to it, it became a bigger issue, to issue an alert.
And unfortunately an issue couldn’t be raised only to those it was relevant for.
All this lead to was, not updating the status page and thus it becoming a useless tool to determine if an issue was occurring.
Back to Twitter...
I feel the product needs a lot work in practice, and possibly in implementation and training.
Ah, sadly I believe your personal experience is very common.
It's insane really; a company puts out a status page to say to their customers "you can trust and rely on us through that dedicated medium to know our status", and if the customers in question buy into the proposition and use it the very first thing that company does is make it so you cannot trust and rely on them through that dedicated medium. Succedding is what causes it to ultimately fail.
Status page should have stayed as undocumented features for "the little guys" behind the scene to communicate and never get into the open world where PR and marketing and decision makers can roam.
Status pages shouldn't need any manual intervention.
I setup mine to automatically monitor my website from another service provider in a different datacenter. That way I know if the server is down for any reason and it updates automatically.
If my server goes down, within 5 minutes the status page is red. End of story.
