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Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

It's at least nice to see a company call this what it is (a "major outage") - seems like most status pages would be talking about "degraded performance" or similar.

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I suspect this is because they don't have contracts with enforceable SLAs yet. When they do, you will see more 'degraded performance'.

People get credits for 'outages', but if it is sometimes working for someone somewhere then that is the convenient fiction/loophole a lot of companies use.

One CFO forced us to use AWS status data for the SLA reports to key clients. One dev was even pulled aside to make a branded page that reported AWS status as our own and made a big deal about forcing support to share the page when a client complained.

It wasn't a happy workplace

asteroid strikes a region

Green Check with (i) notice

(i) - Our service remains rock-solid.

Most services have a lot more systems than OpenAI and thus it is degraded performance when a few of them don’t work. Degraded performance isn’t a good thing, I don’t understand the issue with this verbiage.

When a system is completely broken for most end users, some companies call it "degraded performance" when it should be, in fact, called "major outage".

Having multiple systems down sure sounds like a major outage to me. Not a complete outage, sure, but still a major one.

Black - Entire datacenter is down

Red - Entire services are down

Orange - Partial outage of services, some functionality completely down

Yellow - Functionality performance degraded and may timeout/fail, but may also work

Greed - Situation normal

Or, for a typical software company:

Green - Situation normal

Yellow - An outage more severe than usual

Orange, Red - would trigger SLAs, so not possible and therefore not implemented

Black - Status page down too, served from cache, renders as Green

"Degraded performance" means degraded performance, i.e. the system is not as performant as usual, probably manifesting as high API latencies and/or a significant failure rate in the case of some public-facing "cloud" service.

If certain functions of the service are completely unresponsive, i.e. close to 100% failure rate, that's not "degraded performance"---it's a service outage.

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