This is what happens when performance reviews are tied to outages. I spent over five years at AWS, and even internally we treated the AWS status page as a running joke -- a bunch of us used an extension which just set the level of every outage to one higher than had been posted (i.e., green i/blue diamond was yellow, yellow was red).
The problem is, organisational leaders have performance reviews (and bonuses) tied to service health, and they'll avoid declaring outages to avoid looking bad.
“Users are having trouble connecting”
“Some customers are encountering various errors”
They know exactly what’s going on, at least superficially via usage metrics, and should be able to quantify it.