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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

>rest assured there will be no available hands to keep the status page updated

That's not how status pages if implemented correctly work. The real reason status pages aren't updated is SLAs. If you agree on a contract to have 99.99% uptime your status page better reflect that or it invalidates many contracts. This is why AWS also lies about it's uptime and status page.

These services rarely experience outages according their own figures but rather 'degraded performance' or some other language that talks around the issue rather than acknowledging it.

It's like when buying a house you need an independent surveyor not the one offered by the developer/seller to check for problems with foundations or rotting timber.

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SLA’s usually just give you a small credit for the exact period of the incident, which is arymetric to the impact. We always have to negotiate for termination rights for failing to meet SLA standards but, in reality, we never exercise them.

Reality is that in an incident, everyone is focused on fixing issue, not updating status pages; automated checks fail or have false positives often too. :/

Yep, every SLA I've ever seen only offers credit. The idea that providers are incentivized to fudge uptime % due to SLAs makes no sense to me. Reputation and marketing maybe, but not SLAs.

The compensation is peanuts. $137 off a $10,000 bill for 10 hours of downtime, or 98.68% uptime in a month, is well within the profit margins.

This is weird - at this level contracts are supposed to be rock solid so why wouldn't they require accurate status reporting? That's trivial to implement, and you can even require to have it on a neutral third-party like UptimeRobot and be done with it.

I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.

> I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.

Is it? Say you've got some big geographically distributed service doing some billions of requests per day with a background error rate of 0.0001%, what's your threshold for saying whether the service is up or down? Your error rate might go to 0.0002% because a particular customer has an issue so that customer would say it's down for them, but for all your other customers it would be working as normal.

> something being down or not is pretty black and white

This is so obviously not true that I'm not sure if you're even being serious.

Is the control panel being inaccessible for one region "down"? Is their DNS "down" if the edit API doesn't work, but existing records still get resolved? Is their reverse proxy service "down" if it's still proxying fine, just not caching assets?

I understand there are nuances here, and I may be oversimplifying, but if part of the contract effectively says "You must act as a proxy for npmjs.com" yet the site has been returning 500 Cloudflare errors across all regions several times within a few weeks while still reporting a shining 99.99% uptime, something doesn't quite add up. Still, I'm aware I don't know much about these agreements, and I'm assuming the people involved aren't idiots and have already considered all of this.

> something being down or not is pretty black and white

it really isn't. We often have degraded performance for a portion of customers, or just down for customers of a small part of the service. It has basically never happened that our service is 100% down.

Are the contracts so easy to bypass? Who signs a contract with an SLA knowing the service provider will just lie about the availability? Is the client supposed to sue the provider any time there is an SLA breach?

Anyone who doesn't have any choice financially or gnostically. Same reason why people pay Netflix despite the low quality of most of their shows and the constant termination of tv series after 1 season. Same reason why people put up with Meta not caring about moderating or harmful content. The power dynamics resemble a monopoly

Most of services are not really critical but customers want to have 99.999% on the paper.

Most of the time people will just get by and ignore even full day of downtime as minor inconvenience. Loss of revenue for the day - well you most likely will have to eat that, because going to court and having lawyers fighting over it most likely will cost you as much as just forgetting about it.

If your company goes bankrupt because AWS/Cloudflare/GCP/Azure is down for a day or two - guess what - you won't have money to sue them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and most likely will have bunch of more pressing problems on your hand.

Why bother to put the SLA in the contract at all, if people have no choice but to sign it?

Netflix doesn't put in the contract that they will have high-quality shows. (I guess, don't have a contract to read right now.)

The company that is trying to cancel its contract early needs to prove the SLA was violated, which is very easy of the company providing the service also provides a page that says their SLA was violated. Otherwise it's much harder to prove.

The client is supposed to monitor availability themselves, that is how these contracts work.

I imagine there will be many levels of "approvals" to get the status page actually showing down, since SLA uptime contracts is involved.

I work for a small company. We have no written SLA agreements.

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