This point is repeated often, and the incentives for Amazon to downplay the actual downtime are definitely there.

Wouldn't affected companies be incentivized to make a lawsuit about AMZ lying about status? It would be easy to prove and costly to defend from AWS standpoint.

Suggesting that when the status page sends a status request and hears no response—it defaults to green—hear no evil and see no evil —> report no evil

Either way—overt lies or engineering incompetence—it’s disappointing!

Pretty low chance that the status page is automated, especially via health checks. I imagine it's a static asset updated by hand.

Or the service that updates the status page runs out of us-east-1.

It has customer relationship implications. I guarantee you it is updated by a support agent.