The trouble with API keys that never expire
A key issued years ago, never rotated, and still valid today is not a convenience. It is a liability nobody has actually looked at in years.
The case for keeping a public status page honest
A status page exists to answer one specific question quickly: is the thing I depend on working right now, and if not, does the provider know about it yet. That is a narrow, useful purpose, and it only works if the page reflects reality closely enough to trust on the day it actually matters, which is the day something is broken. A status page that has shown all green for two years straight is either describing a genuinely flawless system, which is rare, or it is describing a page that gets updated on a schedule that has little to do with what customers are actually experiencing.
The value of a status page is almost entirely concentrated in the moments it is least convenient to update honestly: during an active incident, when the instinct is to wait and see if it resolves quickly before committing to a public acknowledgment. That instinct is understandable and it is also exactly backwards from what makes a status page useful. A developer checking a status page during an outage on their own end wants to know, as early as possible, whether the problem is on their side or the provider's. A page that waits to confirm an incident until it is fully understood and resolved answers that question too late to be worth much.
We think the honest approach is to treat a status page as an operational tool rented out to customers, not a marketing surface. That means posting a real incident when a real incident is happening, even before every detail is known, and updating it as the picture becomes clearer, rather than holding the page green until a clean, fully resolved summary is ready to publish. A rough, early acknowledgment is more useful to someone debugging their own system in real time than a polished, delayed one.
This connects to something we think about across the whole product, not just incident communication: giving developers information they can act on, as close to real time as possible. Quota headers on every response exist for the same reason a status page should be honest during an incident. Both are about not making someone wait until after the fact to learn something that would have changed what they did in the moment.
A status page with an occasional yellow or red entry on it is not a mark against the provider. It is evidence the page is actually connected to something real. The page that should worry a prospective customer more is the one that never shows a blemish at all, because a system with genuinely zero incidents over a meaningful span of time is rare enough that its absence from the page usually says more about the page than about the system.