Comment by mvkel

It's because if you automate it, something could/would happen to the little script that defines "uptime," and if that goes down, suddenly you're in violation of your SLA and all of your customers start demanding refunds/credits/etc. when everything is running fine.

Or let's say your load balancer croaks, triggering a "down" status, but it's 3am, so a single server is handling traffic just fine? In short, defining "down" in an automated way is just exposing internal tooling unnecessarily and generates more false positives than negatives.

Lastly, if you are allowed 45 minutes of downtime per year and it takes you an hour to manually update the status page, you just bought yourself an extra hour to figure out how to fix the problem before you have to start issuing refunds/credits.