No, it's not automated. I'm sure the underlying tech is automated, but once companies grow beyond a certain size, it needs a human to say "show this status change to the world" because there are lots of things depending on it (e.g. SLAs, but also bonuses, I assume), so they don't want a potential bug in the status system to influence that.
It's weird how slow they are with manual sign-off though.
No but if msft’s own status page shows downtime more than 0.01% of the time msft will struggle to argue they haven’t breached their SLA, so financial consequences to the company.
But I don’t want the page connected to their bonuses or SLA’s I just want to know whether they are having any issues anywhere. And I need to know within a minute of my own service not working so I’m not chasing the wrong thing. This can’t be an unreasonable thing to ask for?
I agree. I'm already annoyed at Hetzner with their 5 minute lag in reporting network outages where I'm regularly noticing them, investigating, checking status and then only after a few minutes see them updating and saying "it's us".
If you work with Microsoft, you might as well spend a few bucks extra and have an external monitoring system monitor Microsoft's systems so you get real-time third-party confirmation when your monitoring alerts you of issues concerning your system. It's the price you pay for scale, I guess. More money involved = more lawyers involved = more accountants involved = more MBAs involved = more corporate bullshit.
It's weird how slow they are with manual sign-off though.