As an alternate example, Github tends to have a pretty good status page in my experience. It'll usually be up-to-date within minutes of people chatting about issues on work Slack and gets updated at a regular cadence with details.

AWS on the other hand... We usually just reach out to our TAMs and say "Hey, our application monitoring is showing tons of errors interacting with service X--can you check your super secret internal dashboards and see what the deal is?" It's nice to at least have a "Yeah the service is completely hosed and in a bad place" or a "Yeah, some changes went wrong and are being rolled back". The former usually requires some sort of mitigation while the latter can largely be ignored

Having a fully up to date status page is what prevents useless repetitive cases during degradation or an outage. If I'm having issues but you show all green, I'm submitting a case.

For large incumbents, publishing a complete and accurate status page might not only be a recipe for bad press, but also lawsuits. There's significant downside and not much upside to telling the whole truth. It's entirely unsurprising that cloud providers like AWS or Azure would play definitional games w/ what constitutes an outage. Rolling 5m, 1% outage across your entire customer base? That's just a hiccup! If your staff has to field more confused questions and complaints, it's a relatively small price to pay.

I was on support until a few minutes ago (SQL DB, not general Azure), and the status page was ironically my first indication something was up since said status page was having DNS issues.

Their health page was down too. This was the first place were i saw something.

A colleague saw it on twitter.

So yes, it's useful