Don't host it on AWS. :)

This is actually a hard problem because many of these services are localized using BGP anycasting. So the status checking would have to have probe nodes all over the world.

We learned about this particular outage from health checks we had set up in Pingdom. Somebody like them could expose those checks as a public service, and try to become the go-to place for getting the real status of AWS.

Seconded

At least for EC2 status updates and their color (green i, etc) are only posted if they meet certain thresholds. IE: Greater than $X number of instances are actually offline or unavailable etc.

Possibly many of the outages you happen to be seeing are in reality not that large thus not meeting the threshold to have a post, or major status update.