Back when I worked there, the AWS status board was (and probably still is) terrible b/c Service teams owned that communication channel, not AWS Support. That really ought to have been changed. Service teams don't have the time or incentive to give real-time updates. Why not just let the people who know the customers best deal with parsing the TT and giving updates?
It has.
> Service teams don't have the time or incentive to give real-time updates. Why not just let the people who know the customers best deal with parsing the TT and giving updates?
The escalation team inside PS now drafts customer messaging within ~5 minutes of the impact being identified (usually about 5 minutes into an event) and if the impact is significant enough to post to the public dashboard, than may take another 5 minutes. Depending on the type of impact, affected customers will be notified via the personal health dashboard.
PS owns the tooling that does this, and is responsible for driving the process, but the service org's (e.g. EC2, S3 etc.) representative often makes the call on whether to post to the public status page or not (depending on the scale of the impact, e.g. 20% API failure rate for 5% customers probably won't make the status page, but affected customers will get notices). TT is almost out ... but the PS tooling supports it and its replacement, and provides easy access and summaries for internal teams (so you don't need to refresh TT or subscribe to the ticket just to see what the status is).
Sadly, the closer you are to the action of a thing like this (for example, I'm on NetInfra SRE and we were part of the group that put in place the current mitigations you're seeing work now), the less you can say without fear of subtle inaccuracy or releasing non-public information.
