Too true. Today when Google's App Engine failed hard, they flat out said: "App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues – Python, Java, Go … Oct 26 2012, 07:30 AM-11:59 PM … Current Availability: 55.90%" and showed read/write I/O metrics were spiking through the roof. Their dashboard clearly labeled the relevant icon as the most severe "Service Interruption".

I admire that level of transparency.

And if things are really broken, green with a little "i" icon next to it.

You left out "Green if everything is working - except the Chaos Monkey. All systems are working properly, but none of them failing randomly 'for your convenience'"

Haha. I'd love someone to release a greasemonkey/userscript for that status page to make degraded service more obvious.

Lol, thanks for a good laugh.