(Former akamai employee) Akamai have an incident process that handles both "things are bad for multiple customers" as well as "we need eyes on this from multiple departments/stakeholders asap". If you're hitting a wall debugging an issue on your own, especially if it's not overtly customer impacting, declaring an incident is an effective way of getting the attention needed to solve it.

Once you declare the incident, the process includes these status page updates, alongside equivalent internal status updates.

In this case, they probably wanted to maximise coordination, so used the process designed for that.

Also a former Akamai employee.

I left because I didn't like the pressure / pager duty, but I seriously respect how smooth and well thought out their operations were.