Status pages are the worst of all things to work on.
First, deciding what to put on them is PM hell. Is it customer-facing? Developer-facing? Both?
Then, for each item, how do you test so you can be really sure? Half the time tests will produce either false negatives or false positives. If your test writes data (like, say, posting a comment), is it a meaningful test of it's to a test or demo topic? But if it's to real topics, the test itself becomes user impacting.
Or you can use traffic stats to estimate whether things are going well, but then your traffic stats are question. Something may report zero traffic when things are great, or normal traffic when things are broken.
Then you have the classic "the tests are failing because the testing infra is broken, but production users are fine."
There just isn't a good answer to most of the problems status pages face. So, yeah, they suck, but I think there may be a Godel argument here that it is not possible for them to be timely, meaningful, and accurate.
Most of this is about automated status pages, but it doesn't apply to status pages where the incident response team manually says "yes there is a problem" and "ok all problems are fixed".
True, but those teams have the same problem. How do they know it's really fixed, for every scenario, for everyone, everywhere?
They have a pretty good idea if something internal is broken, but it's very hard to know that everything is fixed.
That said, I agree that manually updated pages are generally more useful and accurate than automated ones. It's just an extra tax on the incident team.
Twice within the last month, new comments just... stopped showing up for several hours. And it took at least an hour from when I first noticed it to when it got mentioned on their status page.
When I say "stopped showing up", I mean I could see my comments on my user page but they wouldn't show up on the thread (even for me), and I would get replies to older comments I made in my inbox but they wouldn't show up in the thread either. (Yes, only an hour or so before this happened I made a post that got a bunch of engagement, and I was actively responding to people who replied to me.)
I knew the mods weren't removing my comments because your removed comments still show up in the thread for you while you're logged in, and the mods weren't removing the comments of the people replying to me either because they would've disappeared from my inbox if that was the case. Ergo, outage.
>Monitoring - We're observing improvements across the site and expect issue to recover for most users. We will continue to closely monitor the situation.
>"A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue," Reddit told Engadget in a statement.
I don't understand why they decided to remove the errors and post/comment backlog graphs instead of fixing them. It was a great way to see when to stop refreshing and go make coffee, while status remained green for while.
Nothing on redditstatus.com (yet?): https://www.redditstatus.com/
UPD Currently on redditstatus.com:
>Reddit Failing to Load
>Identified - We're aware of problems loading content and are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Jun 12, 2023 - 07:58 PDT