I hypothesize that as with many things in the business world, anything that would hurt stock price must be avoided, especially in the short term. So, I picture

I hypothesize that as with many things in the business world, anything that would hurt stock price must be avoided, especially in the short term. So, I picture some rich business executive, technical or not, who ultimately would decide if there should be a status page and how it would look, saying to themself, "Why would we tell the whole world our service is down? This would cause panic among everyone, rather than just annoyance to those who truly care." Of course it becomes an even bigger problem at that point to blatently say "ALL SYSTEMS GO" with green checks, when it clearly isn't the case. So, Amazon, like any other multi multi multi billion dollar business empire, clouds the water and seeks to control the perspective. "This wasn't downtime, as per your SLA. It was inability for some to access our servers, which were powered on the whole time!" Anything to shore up stock price is to be pursued. Anything to bring it down is to be avoided.