And not just outages, but security incidents. I’ve worked at/with/for many companies as both an employee and a consultant where the top priority wasn’t to have fewer security incidents, but to have fewer security incidents that would require disclosure.
Publicly disclosing an incident to a customer is embarrassing and potentially damaging but almost equally as damaging is telling other teams you had an incident. Now anything that goes wrong is your fault by default because “it’s probably related to that incident” and any new security policies are blamed on the other team: “we wouldn’t have to do that if Ops didn’t mess up last month”.
The answer to “is this service suffering an outage” is seriously complex and hard to determine. The answer to “is this a security incident” is 10x harder and 100x more political because the industry is still just so wildly immature.
Additionally, you're penalized for doing it "right", because you're often competing against companies which rarely say that anything's wrong (ahem, Mailchimp). You look worse, because you're being transparent about service status, which creates the perception that you're generally less stable.
Many companies tie uptime and outages to performance reviews, either directly or indirectly.
Admitting that your services are down could be costly to your career progression and bonus. When people know this, they go to great lengths to avoid admitting fault. Updating the status page is the first admission of fault. The longer the status page shows an outage, the worse it gets.
I worked with an ex-Amazon engineer at a previous company. After each outage, he would spend days or weeks writing long reports explaining how the outage was not his fault. He didn't care so much about downtime so much as not getting blamed for outages. Predictably, this was terrible for team morale and most of his team members ended up quitting.
If anyone else finds themselves in this position, the solution is have another team responsible for monitoring uptime, and to rate teams on how quickly they acknowledge outages. Once the response time and accuracy of your status page becomes a performance metric, people are less likely to play games with it.
Failure happens at the speed of computing but agreeing that something is failing in a way that customers need to be told about is a slower process.
Even when status pages are fully automatic (rather than manually updated), there will tend to be gaming of the metrics that constitute that.
Ideally you would just be monitoring your SLOs and publishing that to customers... that doesn't seem to be how it works, anywhere.