Most of the time these status pages sit on, and store data in, the same infrastructure as the things it's supposed to be reporting on.

In my experience, changing the status pages at many companies involves a C-level decision, since that status page change serves as an admission of service outages. And service outages can trigger availability clauses in contracts, costing the company significant amounts of money.

The mental acrobatics to justify not changing the status are often astounding: "One customer can load a partial page from Timbuktu, so we're not down."

Probably the case. I've seen the same thing with Heroku. I've report an issue, then half an hour later it gets updated. Could also be a bad cache that takes a while to invalidate.

HN Could make a killing selling a saas product that monitors if sites are up. Honestly it's more reliable at this point.