The outage dashboard is normally only updated if a certain $X percent of hosts / service is down. If the EC2 section were updated every time a rack in a datacenter went down, it would be red 24x7.

It's only updated when a large percentage of customers are impacted, and most of the time this number is less than what the HN echo chamber makes it appear to be.

I mean, sure, there are technical reasons why you would want to buffer issues so they're only visible if something big went down (although one would argue that's exactly what the "degraded" status means).

But if the official records say everything is green, a customer is going to have to push a lot harder to get the credits. There is a massive incentivization to “stay green”.