Status pages are not driven by automation, they are driven by PMs. Amazon, Google... all of the big players work them this way.

And I'm not surprised, since actually reporting it as down has a lot of political blowback (not to mention contract blowback) within the company.

Also, accurately reporting about an arbitrary source of downtime means you're smart enough to avoid the same sources of downtime.

Not that this can't have been an obvious reason (deleting all the servers in a datacenter or similarly trivial but severe) but it's likely impossible to ensure status page accuracy.

You could just ping the servers once a minute and tell if they're up or not. No need to know why they've gone down.

That only indicate the frontend of the service is up and potentially running. Being about to respond to ping and being able to serve HTTP request are two different things, and being able to serve HTTP request vs a fully functional website are two different things. Think about wrong SSL certification, wrong domain mapping between frontend/backend, broken JS/CSS etc.

This outage is a great example. I can ping Google Calendar servers and I get an HTTP response. SSL also works like a charm.

And yet everybody agrees it's down.

Most outages aren't so obvious as this one, and any ping will fail intermittently (often because the ping agent has a failure.) Google definitely has loads of pings hitting Google Calendar in various ways. Exposing this monitoring to the public is not practical or really useful. (And would aid would-be attackers.)

it's there now.

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc...

> We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar.

Hmm, I don't see anything there yet for me.

It's amazing how many of these status pages don't actually work in many situations.

Wasn't there that time AWS had some outage, but the red-circle picture (for failure) was itself hosted on the unavailable AWS service, so their status page didn't show it as being unavailable? Or am I mis-remembering something/repeating an urban legend?

Nah, you're remembering correctly, this happened. The failure icon was hosted on S3, but S3 was down. It was a great moment.

Here's their tweet about it: https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836656664635846656

Thank you for confirming, and the citation!

Yep, the icons were hosted on S3, which was unavailable

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/

Yes, that was the S3 outage last year...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756111

These pages at Google/Amazon/Netflix are updated by the incident response team, so it's a manual task.

Edited my comment to just say the same thing. Haha What's the point of them then?

It's certainly helpful to know that Google is aware of the problem and fixing it.

I guess technically the "server" is responding, so...

On that page's footer:

> ©2019 Google - Last updated: June 18, 2019 at 3:12:13 PM UTC+1

Looks like it was last updated before the outage.

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar."