Your Slack won't load. Is it you, your VPN, the office wifi, or Slack? You open Slack's status page and it's green. It's often green while you're clearly down, because a company updates its own status page after it confirms an incident — not the moment you feel it.
I spent the last few months building OutageDeck, which reads the official status source of 96 cloud and SaaS providers and folds them into one place. I assumed the hard part would be the frontend. It wasn't. The hard part was that "official status" is a swamp. Here's what I found in it.
The short version:
There is no standard status format. Statuspage is common, but the tail is bespoke — Google, Slack, Heroku, Azure over RSS, and AWS in UTF-16.
Providers' own timestamps lag, sometimes by days, so you can't compute uptime from them.
