We learned about this particular outage from health checks we had set up in Pingdom. Somebody like them could expose those checks as a public service, and try to become the go-to place for getting the real status of AWS.

At least for EC2 status updates and their color (green i, etc) are only posted if they meet certain thresholds. IE: Greater than $X number of instances are actually offline or unavailable etc.

Possibly many of the outages you happen to be seeing are in reality not that large thus not meeting the threshold to have a post, or major status update.