Status pages
should be driven that way, though. "legal and financial" implications and "It's not a conspiracy" is a poor excuse.
Now, I'm on Azure, but it seems like from the comments the situations are similar. So, instead of an automatically updated status page that would help engineers do their jobs, we get a status page that isn't accurate, and customers have pull teeth to get a service credit where/when one is due. And it seems like you can have the cake and eat it too here: while IANAL, a footnote in the SLA or the status page that "this is a machine estimate and not reflective of what goes into the SLA" should do it, no?