It's crazy to me how long it takes Amazon to notify users that there is even an issue. I think it took 15 minutes for them to acknowledge an issue, thats a lot of time for our services.
That's because it's a political issue inside AWS. They have the technology to report it automatically, but there's a strong pressure not to post "green-i" or yellow or red, because those things impact SLA payments. So if there's any way they can spin it as not an outage they will try not to post it.
Can confirm this, it's political. It's always great seeing the "rationality" for not doing the right thing. After the 3 outages last December, I can remember a certain person in a certain global outage slack channel laughing at customers who weren't "resilient" enough to withstand the outage. Then AWS focused a resiliency campaign to document all those customers risks, as if AWS's own poorly designed system wasn't the cause for peoples inability to fail over. Glad I'm out of that place, it's super toxic these days.