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Ask HN: Why are status pages so useless?

by redm on 1/30/24, 2:58 PM with 4 comments

Serious question. Almost always, if I run into an issue on a platform, and I check the "status page," there is almost no useful information (or any information at all).

Is it just companies don't want the black eye of acknowledging otuages or problems? Or, is it just one of those boxes companies tick? 1) Create a product, 2) Create a Status page, but in reality, when problems occur, no one is thinking about updating status pages; they are busy triaging and fixing the issue?

  • by epc on 1/30/24, 3:18 PM

    I’m building a thing now and I have to say the last thing I’d consider is a status page. Great idea in theory. But the world today sucks and all it does is open you up to, at best, endless complaining. At worst you get the script kiddies who think now, now is the time to attack. You get media and bloggers demanding quotes about how you failed to anticipate a 10000% increase in traffic overnight. And you get “shareholder rights” litigants (if you’re public) demanding compensation for depriving them of $0.0003 in revenue per share for the twenty minutes it took to fix the problem.

    Far better to focus on fixing the problem and apologizing to the paying customers afterwards.

  • by mtmail on 1/30/24, 3:17 PM

    Are you talking about status pages of huge organization (full-time 24/7 staff monitoring everything like https://news.cision.com/ericsson/i/screens-and-employees-in-...) or smaller companies?

    We (small company) have a status page and in case of emergency we can hardly act fast enough to both fix and keep everybody updates, so the first post will be more like "we're investigating" so people don't email us.

  • by nullindividual on 1/30/24, 3:04 PM

    You're asking a question in a universal sense when you (and the rest of HN) knows that there is no universal answer, nor is your observation universally correct.

    Rephrase your question in a way that is answerable.

  • by jjgreen on 1/30/24, 3:04 PM

    GitLab's seems pretty good.