GitHub's outages have hit me hard over the past week or so. I don't think it's a matter of them being transparent--if anything, I was hitting errors well before their status page updated. Yesterday it was completely unusable for much of my workday, and today tasks that normally take me a few minutes have been taking hours.
This has been my experience as well. I don't know if that means GitHub is being overly transparent about issues or I've just been lucky but I would hate if people punished services for being transparent and informative on their status pages.