It's not really dishonest though because there is nuance. Most everything in EC2 is still working it seems, just the console is down. So is it really down? It should probably be yellow but not red.

if you cannot access the control plane to create or destroy resources, it is down (partial availability). The jobs that are running are basically zombies.

I'm right in the middle of an AWS-run training and we literally can't run the exercises because of this.

let me repeat that: my AWS trainign that is run by AWS that I pay AWS for isn't working, because AWS is having control plane (or other) issues. This is several hours after the initial incident. We're doing training in us-west-2, but the identity service and other components run in us-east-1.

I’m running EKS in us-west-2. My pods use a role ARN and identity token file to get temporary credentials via STS. STS can’t return credentials right now. So my EKS cluster is “down” in the sense that I can’t bring up new pods. I only noticed because an auto-scaling event failed.

We ran through the whole 4.5 hour training and the training app didn't work the entire time.

Seems like the API is still working and so is auto scaling. So they aren’t really zombies.

Partial availability isn’t the same as no availability.

The API is NOT working -- it may not have been listed on the service health dashboard when you posted that, but it is now. We haven't been able to launch an instance at all, and we are continuously trying. We can't even start existing instances.

Depending the workload being run users may or may not notice. Should be Yellow at a minimum.

Heroku is currently having major problems. My stuff is still up, but I can't deploy any new versions. Heroku runs their stuff on AWS. I have heard reports of other companies who run on AWS also having degarded service and outages.

i'd say when other companies who run their infrastruture on AWS are going out, it's hard to argue it's not a real outage.

But AWS status _has_ changed to yellow at this point. Probably heroku could be completely down because of an AWS problem, and AWS status would still not show red. But at least yellow tells us there's a problem, the distinction between yellow and red probably only matters at this point to lawyers arguing about the AWS SLA, the rest of us know yellow means "problems", red will never be seen, and green means "maybe problems anyway".

I believe the entire us-east-1 could be entirely missing, and they'd still only put a yellow not a red on status page. After all, the other regions are all fine, right?

"Good at finding excuses" is not the same thing as "honest."

SNS seems to be at least partially down as well

My company relies on DynamoDB, so we're totally down.

edit: partly down; it's sporadically failing

Little honesty from cloud providers will ensure regulators don't step in.

Zero directly-attributable, calculable-at-time-of-decision cost. Of course there's a cost in terms of customers who leave because of the dishonest practice, but, who knows how many people that'll be? Out of the customers who left after the outage, who knows whether they left due to not communicating status promptly and honestly or whether it was for some other reason?

Versus, if a company has X SLA contracts signed, that point to Y reimbursement for being out for Z minutes, so it's easily calculable.