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Comment by shmatt

2 days ago

IIRC status pages drive customer compensation for downtime. Updating it is basically signing the check for their biggest customers, in most similar companies you need a very senior executive to approve the update

On the other side of this, Firebase probably doesn't have money at stake making the update

It is not the status page that drives customer compensation. It is downtime.

  • The status page is essentially an admission of guilt. It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.

    • > It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.

      Is that true in this case or are you speculating? My company runs a cloud platform. Our strategy is to have outages happen as rarely as possible and to proactively offer rebates based on customer-measured downtime. I don't know why people would trust vendors that do otherwise.

      1 reply →

Nah, its just some client side caching / JS stuff. Clicking the big refresh button fixed it for me, 15 minutes before OP noted it.

(n.b. as much as Google in aggregate is evil, they're smart evil. You can't avoid execs approving every outage because checks without some paper trail, and execs don't want to approve every outage, you'd have to rely on too many engineers and sales people, even as ex-employees, to keep it a secret. disclaimer: xoogler)

(EDIT: for posterity, we're discussing a "overall status" thing with a huge refresh button, right above a huge table chockful of orange triangles that indicate "One or more regions affected" - even when the "overall status" was green, the table was still full of orange and visible immediately underneath. My point being, you gotta suppose a wholeeee bunch of stuff to get to the point there was ever info suppressed, much less suppressed intentionally to avoid cutting checks)