November 4, 2025
Outage? Please hold for approvals
Ask HN: Why are most status pages delayed?
Because a committee has to approve the panic — and everyone calls it a 'hiccup'
TLDR: Status pages lag because humans, managers, PR, and legal must sign off before declaring an outage. Commenters are split between calling it credit-protecting bureaucracy and defending accuracy; jokes about webcam whiteboards and memories of Reddit’s live graphs highlight frustration over being left in the dark when sites break.
The internet just asked the question we’re all screaming during outages: why do status pages show “all good” while everything is on fire? An ex-cloud engineer spilled the tea: alarms go off, an on‑call wakes up, a manager rallies, a VP decides, and PR/legal wordsmith the message. That’s 30–40 minutes of human approvals before anyone touches the status page. Add the fact that complex systems fail in weird ways, and nobody wants to announce “down” when it might just be one broken corner.
Cue the comments section chaos. Bender went full scorched earth, calling it pure bureaucracy and accusing companies of downgrading “outages” to “degradations” to dodge refunds. xeonmc turned the room into a comedy club: “just put a webcam on a whiteboard and let someone move Post-its.” Meanwhile, bithaze flexed nostalgia: Reddit once had real‑time graphs (no numbers, but still!) so users could see trouble before the suits approved the wording. Then knorker pushed back: “It needs to be correct,” describing endless rounds where engineers nitpick language to avoid misleading the public. Others, like zokier, argued status pages are for major meltdowns, not “tiny glitches.” The hot debate: automate the page with live tests vs. accept the messy human process—because nobody wants “The Shoe Section Is Down” to trigger a site-wide panic.
Key Points
- •Alarms at major sites often trigger 3–15 minutes after degraded functionality, with automatic escalation if unacknowledged after 15 minutes.
- •On-call engineers investigate and validate issues before status updates; managerial and executive approvals follow for serious incidents.
- •PR/communications, partner management, and legal teams review wording and contractual impacts before public status changes.
- •Best-case timeline adds up to roughly 38 minutes before authorized status page edits can occur.
- •Automating status pages via monitoring probes is unreliable due to probe failures, granularity limits, and complex, narrow workflow failures.