What does 'actual status' mean though? If I'm running a website from a single server, the power goes out and the server goes down then it's kinda obvious. I don't think it's so obvious when you have hundreds of data centers serving traffic to billions of people. If one DC becomes inaccessible does that count as an outage? It'll sure feel like it to the affected users, but the vast majority can still use your service.

You need to draw a line in the sand somewhere, but whatever measure you choose is going to be somewhat arbitrary so I think it's reasonable to have a human make the final call (based on some known criteria).

> If one DC becomes inaccessible does that count as an outage? It'll sure feel like it to the affected users, but the vast majority can still use your service.

Then put that on the dashboard! It certainly is an outage for the affected users (by your scenario).

   - 999/1000 Data centers up
   - 100,000 Users without service
   - 6 paying customers without service (will get money back)

Except, sometimes a data center goes down and no one notices. So if a data center goes down, and no user around notices, is it really down?

Are there any large community run status dashboards? Seems like it is something that we can't trust companies to be honest about (due to SLAs).

Just check Hacker News, of course :)

Most of the time, it does!

This is why I can't run a company.

"Sometimes, it's probably almost approximately around what we think could be along the spectrum of known values." - Me, as CEO.

"Our business is not a coherent single entity and we don't have the best operational policies that try to remedy that so I won't make any promises about quality while still sounding like we're worth $1b"

"I apologize for having misspoke earlier. The correct quote is: '...while still sounding like we're maybe worth $1b.' We could be worth more than the disclosed amount; however, we aren't sure if or how often, if ever, someone may be counting that number. It's really up in the air on occasion at around this point." - Me, still CEO, now an award-winning CEO.