“As publishing an incident or uptime statistics can expose the company to financial penalties, you need an ever-increasing amount of buy-in from senior (and sometimes non-technical) leadership before you can give an update.”
Slack’s status page claimed 100% uptime since February 2022 during the same week customers lost Slack to DNS problems. A Slack engineer explained that the number exists to decide refunds. Once the status page becomes the SLA measure, every update needs an executive’s sign-off. The page that was supposed to tell customers about outages now protects the company from paying for them.