An increase in error rates - no biggie, any large system is going to have errors. But when 80%+ of customers loads in the region are impacted (cross availability zones for whatever good those do) - that counts as down doesn't it? Error rates in one AZ - degraded. Multi-AZ failures - down?
It's only updated when a large percentage of customers are impacted, and most of the time this number is less than what the HN echo chamber makes it appear to be.
But if the official records say everything is green, a customer is going to have to push a lot harder to get the credits. There is a massive incentivization to “stay green”.
So i aggree that degraded is not the proper wording - but it's / was not completly vanished. so.... hard to tell what is an common acceptable wording here.
To your point, for support center (which doesn't show a region) it says:
Description
Increased Error Rates
[09:01 AM PST] We are investigating increased error rates for the Support Center console and Support API in the US-EAST-1 Region.
[09:26 AM PST] We can confirm increased error rates for the Support Center console and Support API in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified the root cause of the issue and are working towards resolution.