different severity levels are fine. That's what the indicator is for. Decorating the indicator, normally completely incorrectly, with a tiny extra indicator, is incomprehensible. That's why you've never seen a tiny red light in the upper corner of your green traffic light. Your 'check engine' light is not green with a tiny extra indicator in the corner. The metaphors go on and on.

Customers are totally not interested in the fact that some other random customer may not be experiencing problems and that amazon has a wide variety of services, some of which may not be affected in certain geographies. Customers go to that panel with one express goal: to discover if the problems they are seeing with their servers could be related to them. It is a triage check. The question is not, is Amazon super great and are the availability engineers the bestest on average over time? The question is, what the fuck is going on?

Amazon has suffered catastrophic unavailability, and the green-i has appeared belatedly, an hour or more into the problem. Because as revealed in this post, it is manually put up by engineers. Manually!

Manually!