At least for Steam, I've found it pretty useful.
Somewhat but not entirely similar to BGP looking glass systems.
When I got hired at Amazon in 2001 we had a "gonefishin" page that was a static page that would be served in the event of an outage (this was before status pages, but it was kind of the same thing -- public acknowledgement of a major incident). The standard protocol was within minutes of a sev 1 to make a decision to display the GF page once it was confirmed that the whole site was down and then work to fix the issue.
By the time I left in 2006 that was no longer policy since reporters had setup monitoring for that page to detect outages and report on service availability so they just let it crash and return 500s or whatever the failure mode was. Optimize for making the job of external agencies doing reporting on their availability harder instead of easier.
This is literally what I'm building right now. See reply above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825239
Shoot me an email if anyone is interested in getting beta access.
Looks like there’s been some errors too
Disclaimer - I work at New Relic but not on this.
Marketing and sales. Not /s
We are in dire need of something crowdsourced, or where someone like DataDog or other telemetry systems offer you the ability to share non sensitive metrics publicly for various cloud or SaaS systems that they publish.
Edit: y’all are amazing with these monitoring tools!