Status pages stopped being automated a long time ago because they are bad PR.

Often you’d have dozens if not hundreds of services on a status page. If you have a major networking outage for example, then everything is technically down. Someone screen shots the sea of red that your automated status page is showing and tweets “lol everything is down at [insert company]. Then you get a million imverysmart people posting about single point of failure or whatever.

As a result status pages, in every place I know, require a human to actually declare the outage there. Internal ones are usually automated, but if your service is down due to dependency on another service, you don’t mark yourself as down.

Also most places I know of have moved away from public status alerts anyway. You get a customized alert in your account or email if you happen to be impacted by a particular outage. The public ones are for the very very _very_ bad outages.

My understanding is that it's also a legal CYA. If you have SLAs in place, outages might mean you owe money. So companies tend to err on the side of underreporting.