Google's operations groups are not only regularly updated during an outage, there's a root-cause analysis with remediation and prevention information posted a couple of days after any issue.

See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gce-operations and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-appengine-dow....

I've never ever received a message from AWS when they've had outages that have been affected us significantly. On the contrary, there's been multiple cases where we've experienced issues, contacted them and it's taken a few hours before they realize they're actually having infrastructure problems. Many of these don't even get an entry on their service status pages. So there's still a lot of room for improvement on AWS's side of things as well.

I can confirm this. I remember once when half of the Internet was down and the status reported for EC2 was yellow - experiencing some minor issues :-)

And I find out about it by yelling at Heroku - they told me that Amazon is having issues before Amazon's status turned yellow.

Usually when AWS has an outage they have a nice green circle but with a small blue "i" next to it that you need a loupe to see. Extremely dishonest.