I was once on a team responsible for, among other things, the status page of a pretty big, important product. I always new somewhere in the back of my mind that status pages were not 100% accurate, but it was still a shock to hear my boss's boss flat out tell all the new hires that the page was mostly advertising and politics and that we only ever updated it if a VP had decided that it was ok if there were news stories about the incident.

I see you too are familiar with the Azure status page.