It just monitors the status pages of lots of different services. When I get 30 notices from various unrelated services at once all with comments like "Network connectivity issues", I know some kind of routing issue is plaguing the 'net.
I saw an absolutely crazy way to do this with Nagios[1]. Nagios saves its state in a file, and the suggested way to synchronise two separate systems was to have them look to see if the other one is active. If it is, sync the statefile across. If it isn't, start up nagios locally based on the latest sync'd statefile. I mean, the solution works, but due to Nagios it's inherently hacky. It's bizarre that Nagios doesn't (didn't?) have inbuilt support for failover this way.
[1]https://allmybase.com/2010/10/04/setting-up-fully-redundant-...
The whole thing was born after I was racking my brain trying to debug a problem, then I remembered to check status.whatever.com and realized it wasn't my problem to debug and the provider was already aware of it. I thought it would be nice to get notifications as well as aggregate that info from all the different services I use.
Note a feature in the pipeline which will allow you to subscribe to specific components or specific regions of services. Which will make status notifications for large cloud platforms like Bluemix, Openshift, AWS, DigitalOcean, etc. much more useful.
Edit: this is an edge case, clearly. I just think it's an interesting problem.