Many companies tie uptime and outages to performance reviews, either directly or indirectly.
Admitting that your services are down could be costly to your career progression and bonus. When people know this, they go to great lengths to avoid admitting fault. Updating the status page is the first admission of fault. The longer the status page shows an outage, the worse it gets.
I worked with an ex-Amazon engineer at a previous company. After each outage, he would spend days or weeks writing long reports explaining how the outage was not his fault. He didn't care so much about downtime so much as not getting blamed for outages. Predictably, this was terrible for team morale and most of his team members ended up quitting.
If anyone else finds themselves in this position, the solution is have another team responsible for monitoring uptime, and to rate teams on how quickly they acknowledge outages. Once the response time and accuracy of your status page becomes a performance metric, people are less likely to play games with it.
Admitting that your services are down could be costly to your career progression and bonus. When people know this, they go to great lengths to avoid admitting fault. Updating the status page is the first admission of fault. The longer the status page shows an outage, the worse it gets.
I worked with an ex-Amazon engineer at a previous company. After each outage, he would spend days or weeks writing long reports explaining how the outage was not his fault. He didn't care so much about downtime so much as not getting blamed for outages. Predictably, this was terrible for team morale and most of his team members ended up quitting.
If anyone else finds themselves in this position, the solution is have another team responsible for monitoring uptime, and to rate teams on how quickly they acknowledge outages. Once the response time and accuracy of your status page becomes a performance metric, people are less likely to play games with it.