I also don't appreciate our builds freezing, unable to be cancelled and then eating up hundreds of minutes.
I haven't used GA in a way where it actually costed me anything, but having minutes just tick away while you can't do anything is really stupid if that's the case.
Edit: Another sane solution would probably be to record outage periods and have Billing automatically reconcile for every customer when invoicing. This would require them to admit the outage durations however, so it may be flawed from a human perspective.
At what rate would you do these pings? I don't know how upgrading/downgrading works at GitHub but if they do any sort of refund/credit when you downgrade, it seems like there's some interesting implications for abusing the system (e.g. upgrading/downgrading between pings for "free" service if the time between them is too long) versus performance (e.g. how do you update all users per ping in a timely manner if the time between them is too short?).
Would love to read up more on this approach; seems interesting!
I've created a new discussion in their feedback repo asking for this, three major outages in a week could really do with a post-mortem: https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/13344
Of course, assuming that a future bug won't affect the timeout-minute itself.