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Stack Exchange was in read-only mode all yesterday afternoon Sydney time, at least between 2PM and 6PM AEDT October 30, which would be between 3AM and 7AM UTC October 30. The message I received when attempting to sign in indicates that the reason for this was planned maintenance:

Message - Login unavailable due to maintennance

I would expect to more find information on what maintenance was being done, and how long it might take, on Stack Status. However, during this entire time, Stack Status reported a big green tick and four small green ticks; it did not provide any confirmation that planned maintenance was occurring, nor did it provide any details of that maintenance nor an estimate of how long the maintenance might take.

Stack Status - All systems operational

Is the Stack Status system behaving as designed in this instance? Is the site being in read-only mode (due to maintenance) not considered to be an issue worth noting on Stack Status?

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    My guess is that there was an ISP or DNS issue, and Stack Status only checks if the sites are up/operational, and not whether they're reachable. If that's the case, adding some network-level checks to the Stack Status page would be nice.
    – Robotnik
    Commented Oct 30, 2023 at 23:29
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    Every time I check StackStatus during an uptime problem, it's wrong. I have stopped expecting it to be reflective of uptime problems and would now be more surprised if it did its job.
    – starball
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 0:43
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    From staff: StackStatus is tied into our incident management software and isn't tied to our uptime monitoring software. It's manually updated when an incident is declared. (source)
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 8:21
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    my expectation as a user when a server error page tells me to look at a status page is that the status page will reflect the problem and give reasonably accurate information about the timings of the event.
    – starball
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 8:23
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    Thanks for the report, and thanks @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog for bringing this to my attention. Looks like this is related to the October 30th read only event. We're currently investigating this issue further and will get back when we get to the bottom of it.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 12:55
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    @JoshZhang thanks, but it's not directly about the issue itself, it's more about why StackStatus was not updated at all.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 14:57
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    I'm fine if StackStatus stays what it is. But I want to the server error page to make it clear what I'm going to see when I go there- that it is likely to lag behind in reporting what's going on right now, how long on average it's going to lag behind, and why it lags behind.
    – starball
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 19:56
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    We're still investigating the root cause of the issue and it could happen again tonight. As far as StackStatus, it's manually updated by our staff but we're looking at ways to make it more real time. For now I've created this
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 20:38
  • @JoshZhang there was just a brief outage on MSE and MSO but I don't see it reflected in the thing you just linked. what exactly is it?
    – starball
    Commented Oct 31, 2023 at 23:45
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    @starball that the interruption could have been localized to you. The dashboard I created gets data from our PingDom checks which performs health checks from all their data centers around the world.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented Nov 1, 2023 at 12:05
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    Josh's updated post which I've linked to in the answer below talks about the new solution so I've updated this to status-by-design and am closing as a duplicate to Josh's post.
    – Rosie StaffMod
    Commented Nov 7, 2023 at 19:22

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Some updates have recently been made around incident and uptime reporting. The details have been shared in a separate Meta post which you can read here.

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