Tell HN: GitHub is down (Update: Back online now)

Yes, and some response times too. It was actually useful.

Yes they do, because very rarely would such a healthcheck kind of setup actually work in practice, at a large enough size, for a user-facing dashboard. If you want a healthcheck, look at a Grafana dashboard, not a status page.

By the way, I don't know of a single place where this isn't the case, where a human signs off on and updates the status page during large events (at least at the final decision.) Some of it will be automated, sure, like red flags being raised to operators. But at a certain point it is not possible to automate this in some level to achieve second-level accuracy or whatever; the system is rarely (if ever) in a binary state of "working perfectly" or "not working", but somewhere in between. You can't just fire off a big red error bar every time a blip occurs at a place like GitHub. The system is constantly "in motion". The logical conclusion is to just expose your 50+ Grafana dashboards publicly to every user. Isn't that the most honest "overview" of what is happening with your product? Except this often can't tell them useful things either.

People on here will also mumble about SLAs but if a customer wants a kickback or is seriously worried about events like these, they're generally talking to account managers, not posting on internet forums. That said, a lot of them get weaselly about that stuff unless you're already negotiating prices with an AM in the first place...

Probably requires manual updates. It seems like more and more places have moved to this paradigm now that status pages are tied to SLAs which are tied to money. One might call it the politicization of status pages.

AWS do the same thing. Pretty sure someone updates it manually.

100% degraded is degraded.

IIRC, that's the default verbiage that goes out when someone pulls the "oh shit" lever.

Not many places I have worked for allowed for this to be automatic. A lot of it was so they could provide a coherent explanation as to what the current state of internal attention was directed at vs what everyone can plainly see.

They wait for the HN thread to appear so they don't give false positives.

I think it is so they can "hide" small outages that don't rise to the level of making the news sites so they can look better. A lot of sites do this sort of thing these days.

Same. My desktop won't even currently power on after a move... Looks like I get to reseat all of my RAM tonight :)