> it seems far worse to have status pages fail to reflect actual outages than to have them accidentally report an outage when there isn't one
Thats not the goal.
> It's hard to see how the goal here could be anything other than trying to add plausible deniability for what would otherwise be obvious deception
Thats the goal. The "status page" is considered the source of truth for most of the big contracts. If status-page=OK then your contract with them isn't violated. So changing the status page is a big deal, with real financial implications. The status page isn't a view into the SRE's tickets, its a declaration that the service isn't being provided.
Don't know why this was downvoted. We've definitely been able to provide proof of an outage when the status page showed otherwise and get a refund in the form of server credits by contacting them directly. For all 3 big vendors, AWS, Azure, GCP
Hidden in the SLA details is typically hints on how you can become more resilient in the cloud. So it pays to read the SLA details and really deeply understand what they are telling you.
Thats not the goal.
> It's hard to see how the goal here could be anything other than trying to add plausible deniability for what would otherwise be obvious deception
Thats the goal. The "status page" is considered the source of truth for most of the big contracts. If status-page=OK then your contract with them isn't violated. So changing the status page is a big deal, with real financial implications. The status page isn't a view into the SRE's tickets, its a declaration that the service isn't being provided.