They need to be accurate. At&t status claims everything is fine.
My wireless service is down. Down detector has tens of thousands of reports, so clearly everything is not fine.
Either they automatically update based on automatic tests (like some of the Internet backbone health tests) or they’re manually updated.
If they’re automatic, they’re almost always internal and not public. If they’re manual, they’re almost always delayed and not updated until after the outage is posted to HN anyway.
It’s most annoying when you have something like recently - known maintenance work on my upstream home fiber connection that was resulting in service degradation (but not complete loss, my fiber line was back to DSL or dialup). The chat lady could see that my area was affected, but the issue lookup system couldn’t.
If the issue lookup had told me there as an issue I’d’ve gone on my merry way.
I even checked a few more times until it was resolved; the issue never appeared in the issue lookup system.
Making this decision easy is a fight I fight for my customers every day. :)
Quite often you see automated tests that check how well your cache/in memory data are working. But when some other customer that isn't in the hot path tries to access their request times out. I've seen a lot of people making automated checking systems fail at things like this.
It would be nice if the FTC mandated this. It is exhausting when the status page is taken over by the marketing department (the infamous green check with the little "i").
I'm not familiar, what are some examples?
>Service Alert: Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning. We are working urgently to restore service to them. We will provide updates as they are available.