this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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This is a common problem. Same thing happens with AWS outages too. Business people get to manually flip the switches here. It’s completely divorced from proper monitoring. An internal alert triggers, engineers start looking at it, and only when someone approves publishing the outage does it actually appear on the status page. Outages for places like GitHub and AWS are tied to SLAs that are tied to payouts or discounts for huge customers so there’s an immense incentive to not declare an outage even though everything is on fire. I have yelled at AWS, GitHub, Azure, and a few smaller vendors for this exact bullshit. One time we had a Textract outage for over six hours before AWS finally decided to declare one. We were fucking screaming at our TAM by the end because no one in our collective networks could use it but they refused to declare an outage.
It's manual?? Holy shit, that explains some previous hair pulling.
To be clear, usually there’s an approval gate. Something is generated automatically but a product or business person has to actually approve the alert going out. Behind the scenes everyone internal knows shit is on fire (unless they have shitty monitoring, metrics, and alerting which is true for a lot of places but not major cloud or SaaS providers).