I agree that AWS could improve their openness around service problems. That said, what impacts some customers doesn't impact all customers. Ably may be offline

I agree that AWS could improve their openness around service problems. That said, what impacts some customers doesn't impact all customers. Ably may be offline when AWS has certain types of trouble, but that doesn't mean everyone with services in that AZ or region are having similar problems. You also have to keep in mind that AWS status reports aren't just informational. They have a direct impact on how people use their service. As soon as AWS puts up a yellow dot, people start changing DNS and spinning up failovers in other regions or AZs, which has the potential to cascade into a much bigger failure when resources are unnecessarily tied up in other regions for something that maybe isn't as big a crisis as it sounds at first. This has happened before, and is part of the reason why AWS is so circumspect about announcing problems. Point being that there are ways to architect around AZ and region failure that don't rely on trusting AWS's own reporting. Anyone with a significant investment in or dependency on AWS or any cloud service should not rely on those service's own indicators. All that said, the fact is that in a system as big as AWS there are minor problems going on all the time. It would be healthier for their customers, their PR image, and the response to bigger incidents for them to reveal more details showing that yeah, most of the time some tiny fraction of the system is broken, offline, in a failure state, or some other unknown issue. 500 errors happen with the API sometime, let's see streaming feeds of fail rates from however many endpoints there are. EC2 instances have hardware failures or need to reboot sometimes, let's see some indication of whether that's happening more or less often than normal. Network segments fail or get overloaded... Revealing some of the less pristine guts of the operation (without revealing sensitive details of course) would go along way to being more honest without the bigger risks of saying EC2 in us-east-1 is down!