Indeed. As I write this we're in the midst of our third S3 outage of the day. The past two were eventually documented on the AWS Service Dashboard. The latest one has not yet received its tiny status icon to indicate an outage.

It's one thing that S3 keeps going down today; we run our own server cluster and I accept that 100% uptime isn't possible. But it's aggravating that they can't at least figure out how to give timely updates on their dashboard when something is broken.

We inevitably learn of S3 outages through our internal error reporting systems before AWS posts it to their status page. When they do finally post, it is usually a tiny "information" icon, even when reporting a problem that makes the service unusable. The laggy, misleading nature of their status page gives the impression they must be tying bonuses to the status icons. Can't fathom why else they would be so inept when it comes to keeping us updated when something is wrong. Surely they have sufficient internal monitoring to pick up on these outages long before they update their customers.