The Apple status pages (both of them) are some of the worst of the big league offenders, perhaps second only to Microsoft.

Full disclosure, I operate a product that compares official outage acknowledgment to actual outage impact times. (Which I won't mention to avoid self-promotion.)

For this specific incident, I saw the alert come across my Slack at 19:02 UTC. We received over 100 reports of this outage before the official acknowledgement was posted by Apple on their status page at 21:37 UTC.

Shortly after their acknowledgment, the reports fizzled out and then Apple marked the incident as resolved about 20 minute later.

The whole outage lasted about 4 hours from first report to last and wasn't acknowledged by Apple until 3.5 hours into it.

What's worse is when some service providers simply post a resolved message that is not linked to any outage.

That you experienced. There's tons of things to complain about, vendors being over communicative shouldn't be one of them.