Reporting absolute instead of percentage values definitely makes it more human. But most of these reports & status pages are held up-to-date manually, by engineers, when incidents happen. I’d bet not even half of the real outages end up reported on there.

“It’s just a few minutes of downtime, nobody noticed, best not draw attention to ourselves by placing something on our status page”

Status pages should be tied into (external/simulated) monitoring to update in near real-time, without hiding incidents. Transparency is the only way. By reporting the _real_ hours of downtime, including the small stuff you think people didn’t notice.