What does 'actual status' mean though? If I'm running a website from a single server, the power goes out and the server goes down then it's kinda obvious. I don't think it's so obvious when you have hundreds of data centers serving traffic to billions of people. If one DC becomes inaccessible does that count as an outage? It'll sure feel like it to the affected users, but the vast majority can still use your service.

You need to draw a line in the sand somewhere, but whatever measure you choose is going to be somewhat arbitrary so I think it's reasonable to have a human make the final call (based on some known criteria).