Status pages that can't lie
Most status pages are marketing documents that occasionally mention incidents. We built ours so that the tempting lies are structurally unavailable.
There is a genre of screenshot that does numbers on developer forums every few months: a big provider's status page, all green, next to an error page from that same provider, timestamped the same minute.
Nobody at those companies sat down and decided to lie. The lying is structural. A status page updated by hand, during an incident, by the people busiest with the incident, under a norm where every minute of publicly admitted downtime has a cost, will drift toward green. Every incentive points one way.
We build status page software, so we spent a lot of time asking: which of these failure modes can we make structurally impossible, rather than merely discouraged?
Checks come from four places, and the page shows all four
A single-location check collapses a regional outage into a coin flip. If the probe happens to sit outside the blast radius, the page is green while a continent's worth of your users are down. Our checks run from four named regions and the public page renders each region's state separately. When Frankfurt is broken and Virginia is fine, the page says exactly that, because saying less would be the lie.
Incident copy is templated, on purpose
Status updates on our pages are built from deterministic templates fed by measured state: what is failing, from where, since when. During your worst hour you are not staring at an empty text box deciding how to spin it, and no one can soften "down" into "some users may be experiencing intermittent elevated error rates."
This is also why the incident text on our pages is never machine-generated. A hallucinated sentence published under your name, about your outage, is a special kind of damage. Templates from measurements cannot hallucinate.
The badge and the numbers are the same numbers
The uptime percentage a page shows, the embeddable badge, the RSS feed, and the JSON that tools read all come from the same probe results, and paused monitors read as paused, never as up. There is no separate marketing copy of the data to quietly diverge from the operational copy.
What this costs us
Honesty as a feature has a price tag we pay in sales copy: our pages sometimes show yellow when a competitor's identical page would show green. We think that trade holds up, because a status page has exactly one job, and a status page nobody trusts is decoration.
Our own status runs on the same machinery, measured by the same probes, at status.realuptime.io. If we are having a bad day, that page will say so, whether we like it or not.