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Correct. SLAs aren't calculated off status pages, there are far better ways of calculating it (running a query over responses, for example). Most modern SLAs are customer initiated anyways, so the customer is writing in to request this rather than automatically calculating them. The status page doesn't need to show anything for a customer to provide logs indicating a QoS less than that promised in the SLA.

I don't think it's politics (maybe AWS's is, but GCP wasn't IMO), it's really a function of "in large scale software systems things are constantly failing in all sorts of ways, and it's really hard to output a meaningful automated signal that things are broken. Sure you can set up pingdom type health checks on every endpoint, but even then you're not necessarily guaranteeing that things are working properly.

Source: worked at a few cloud providers, paid out a few SLA violations

Politicization, yes; I've never heard of SLAs being tied to status pages. It is like pulling teeth to get most cloud providers to credit the account when they don't meet SLA, and one always has to ask for it; heaven forbid if credits were paid out automatically when service wasn't rendered.

Or you get weasel-worded out of it. I had a cloud provider deny a service credit; the SLA stated that the service was only out of SLA if it didn't return 2xx. Well, the API returned "2xx Accepted — your request is being processed", and you could use the API to query the job, and the job … never finished or made any progress at all. But the API returned 2xx the entire time, so that was "within SLA".

When I started work at Amazon in 2001 we had a "gonefishing" page for outages that a human had to flip the site to manually.

We actually stopped doing this a year or two later because reporters were setting up monitoring on that page showing up and were reporting on outage statistics based on it. So we just left the site up in whatever degraded state it was in and that made the problem of measuring www.amazon.com uptime externally that little bit more difficult.

Negative growth rate is still growth :)

Ish? I wrote some stuff up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30182591

When I worked at GCP it was all manually updated as well so we could add a sentence about what was actually affected. In any sufficiently large system it's hard to indicate exactly what's broken/how to work around it, so it was just easier to `/status <system> <color> <reason for status>`.

I guess this makes sense, but I don't understand why you couldn't have it change status automatically, and still allow a person to go in after and manually add an explanation.