I didn't say that this case is not an outage. I was just trying to explain why Github were not reporting an outage as an outage. Let me try again: The reason

I didn't say that this case is not an outage. I was just trying to explain why Github were not reporting an outage as an outage. Let me try again: The reason sites report "performance degradation" in these cases, is that what can usually be detected immediately and automatically by metrics is the underlying performance degradation; while the fact that some process got unexpectedly wedged due to the performance degradation usually goes undetected for quite some time, until customers start reporting the outage. And, before the dashboard can be switched to "suspected outage", it has to first be determined whether any of these customers' reports are of a real "outage", and not just of "my own client is programmed to give up on the request after 100s" problems. Each of these weird edge-case distributed-systems failures is usually fixed — stopped from ever happening again — after the first time it gets triggered. Which means that every time one of these happens, it's the first time the system has failed in that particular way. So there's never any automated monitoring in place to notice that the system has failed in that particular way — as that would imply that the failure was in some way predictable. As such, while yes, the outage is real, I don't blame a company for not reporting the outage as such immediately, or for quite a while after it happens. Sometimes it's not clear right up until the root cause is resolved, that it actually was a partial customer-facing outage. Sometimes all your third-party downtime detector apps just aren't doing the right things to hit the code path / get routed through the middlebox that's failing for some customers; and all the real-customer reports getting through to you are vague and muddled. (One thing that can be immensely helpful to a SaaS's ops team, is to have at least one highly-technical company as a customer who reliably only reports "upstream fault" problems, rather than PEBKAC problems. If that canary customer is complaining, then the outage is likely real. They're better than any downtime detector service — and, surprisingly, often faster, too! Sadly, most SaaS businesses have literally no single such customer.)