seriously, they've got a text field on the official status page, why not put the text boulos posted here in that instead of the meaningless text they've got there?
Back when I worked there, the AWS status board was (and probably still is) terrible b/c Service teams owned that communication channel, not AWS Support. That really ought to have been changed. Service teams don't have the time or incentive to give real-time updates. Why not just let the people who know the customers best deal with parsing the TT and giving updates?
It has.
> Service teams don't have the time or incentive to give real-time updates. Why not just let the people who know the customers best deal with parsing the TT and giving updates?
The escalation team inside PS now drafts customer messaging within ~5 minutes of the impact being identified (usually about 5 minutes into an event) and if the impact is significant enough to post to the public dashboard, than may take another 5 minutes. Depending on the type of impact, affected customers will be notified via the personal health dashboard.
PS owns the tooling that does this, and is responsible for driving the process, but the service org's (e.g. EC2, S3 etc.) representative often makes the call on whether to post to the public status page or not (depending on the scale of the impact, e.g. 20% API failure rate for 5% customers probably won't make the status page, but affected customers will get notices). TT is almost out ... but the PS tooling supports it and its replacement, and provides easy access and summaries for internal teams (so you don't need to refresh TT or subscribe to the ticket just to see what the status is).
Sadly, the closer you are to the action of a thing like this (for example, I'm on NetInfra SRE and we were part of the group that put in place the current mitigations you're seeing work now), the less you can say without fear of subtle inaccuracy or releasing non-public information.
Knowing an astroid took out the entire continent tells you something about the repairability, resources required to fix the problem, and generally provides context for later updates, as opposed to other contexts like a cut fiber line, a burning datacenter or a bad power supply.
you're right, there's no additional actionable information there, the status page contains everything i actually need to know. but a bit more information makes me feel better. I guess the difference is your comment reassures me that you actually know what's going on. the status page text (prior to the 14:31 update) could equally mean "we've got this under control" or "shit's broken and we don't know why"
"No" vs "No, I already have plans with X"
First case gives you all the information needed (denial), however in the second case I understand the situation much better. I wouldn't call the text on the status page meaningless though - it's pretty nice and concise already (which is what you want in a "crisis"). Just some brief description of the problem would be good, even though technically unnecessary.