Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think he’s the one nitpicking. From a business perspective the site was down. Nitpicking is telling him: No it is in fact up, the customer just can’t use it.
"Customers are complaining they can't access a thing" "OK, we have databases up, load balancers responding, DNS records check out, last change/deployment was at this time, all these services are up, and the latest test suite is running all green, this narrows down the places where a failure might be with some useful differential diagnosis, now we can move attention to.." "I DON'T CARE THAT YOU THINK THINGS ARE WORKIN…
For troubleshooting and internal use of course you want to describe the outage in precise terms (while being very sure you are not downplaying the impact).
For talking to customers, a sufficiently slow response is the same as no response, and nothing is more irritating than being told 'it's not really down' when they can't use the service.