You're staring at error logs. Your API calls are timing out. Your customers are complaining. You frantically check the vendor's status page and see a reassuring wall of green checkmarks: "All Systems Operational."
Except they're not.
If you've been in this situation, you're not alone. Vendor status pages have a dirty secret: they're often the last place you'll find out about an outage.
The Problem: Incentives Are Misaligned
Here's the uncomfortable truth: vendors don't want to report outages. Every incident that shows up on a status page is ammunition for sales objections, SLA refund requests, and uncomfortable investor questions. The pressure to keep that page green is immense.
This creates a predictable pattern:
- Something breaks
- Internal teams scramble to fix it
- Users start reporting issues
- The status page stays green for as long as possible
- Finally, grudgingly, an "investigating" notice appears
- The incident is retroactively minimized ("brief degradation affecting a small subset of users")
Sound familiar?
Real Examples: When Status Pages Failed
GitHub's 2018 Database Incident
On October 21, 2018, GitHub experienced a significant outage affecting core services. The company's status page showed "All Systems Operational" for over an hour while users couldn't access repositories, pull requests were failing, and webhooks were backed up.
By the time GitHub updated their status page to acknowledge "degraded performance," developers had already flooded Twitter and started coordinating workarounds. The official post-mortem later confirmed the incident lasted far longer than the status page suggested.
AWS: The Dashboard That Couldn't
AWS is notorious for this. During major outages, their Service Health Dashboard often shows green or "informational" notices while actual services are unavailable. The problem? AWS's status dashboard relies on the same infrastructure that's often experiencing the outage.
In December 2021, the US-EAST-1 region suffered a major outage affecting core services including EC2, RDS, and S3. For hours, developers reported complete failures while the AWS dashboard showed only "increased error rates" for select services. The incident impacted huge swaths of the internet — but the status page made it sound like a minor hiccup.
The "Partial Outage" Euphemism
My personal favorite: when a vendor reports a "partial outage" affecting a "small percentage of users" — and it turns out that "small percentage" includes your entire production environment.
Slack, Atlassian, and others have all done variations of this dance. The status page shows yellow, uses careful language about "some users," and downplays severity — while developer communities are experiencing widespread failures.
Why This Happens
Manual Updates: Many status pages require human intervention to update. Someone has to decide it's "bad enough" to post about, then write the message, then get approval. By then, the outage is old news.
Threshold Games: Vendors set internal thresholds for what counts as an "incident." If 4.9% of requests are failing, that might not trigger an automatic update. But if you're the unlucky 4.9%, it's 100% down for you.
Regional Blindness: Status pages often report global or regional status, missing localized issues. Your region might be completely offline while the aggregate view looks fine.
SLA Protection: Every acknowledged outage is a potential SLA credit. The longer they can classify something as "investigating" instead of "outage," the better for their metrics.
What to Do Instead
Don't rely on vendor status pages alone. They're useful for official acknowledgment and post-mortems, but they're terrible early warning systems.
Here's a better approach:
Monitor independently. Use a third-party monitoring service that actually tests API endpoints, response times, and functionality — not just whether the status page says everything's fine.
Aggregate community signals. Tools like API Status Check combine automated monitoring with real-time community reports, giving you a faster, more accurate picture of what's actually working.
Set up your own health checks. Run synthetic tests of critical endpoints from multiple regions. If your vendor is down, you'll know before their status page admits it.
Follow the right Twitter accounts. Often, unofficial accounts and developer communities report issues faster than official channels.
The Bottom Line
Vendor status pages aren't useless — they're just not designed to be early warning systems. They're designed to be official records, carefully curated and legally defensible.
For real-time awareness of what's actually working, you need independent monitoring. That's why we built API Status Check — to give developers a truthful, fast, community-powered view of service health.
Because when your production is on fire, you don't have time to wait for a vendor to draft the perfect PR-approved status update.
Want real-time monitoring for the APIs you depend on? Check out apistatuscheck.com for independent status tracking and instant alerts.
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