Why status page uptime bars must come from real checks, not manual incident logs

A status page is only trustworthy if its uptime data is derived from automated monitoring checks rather than manually published incident reports, according to a technical analysis. When uptime timelines are built from incidents, outages without a corresponding public incident can go unrecorded, making a broken service appear healthy to customers. A common coding pitfall involves setting a monitor's public or private status once at setup, meaning monitors added after an outage silently hide past downtime. To prevent false readings, uptime calculations should require confirmation from multiple regions over consecutive checks before marking downtime, filtering out network noise. Crucially, the same rule that triggers on-call alerts should also drive the uptime bar, ensuring the two never contradict each other.