Alert fatigue. Down Detector will show an outage with a service when the intermediate network is down. Companies have to triage alerts and once they’re validated they are posted on a status page. Some companies abuse this to hide their outages. Others delay in a reasonable manner.
I have considered building something to address this and even own honeststatuspage.com to eventually host it on. But it’s a complex problem without an obviously correct answer.
Yeah. Down Detector is more or less meaningless unless something massive has happened, and as you say it has terrible consequences for knock-on services.
It's not even just intermediate networks, it's sometimes direct coinnections. For example, a flood of people reporting an outage on mobile phone network X when the problem they are experiencing is not being able to call a loved one who is on phone network Y, which is the one that is down. This happened a little while back in the UK, leading the other phone providers to have to deny there was some broad outage (which is not an easy thing to reassure when there are so many MVNOs sharing network Y)
I have considered building something to address this and even own honeststatuspage.com to eventually host it on. But it’s a complex problem without an obviously correct answer.