It's at least nice to see a company call this what it is (a "major outage") - seems like most status pages would be talking about "degraded performance" or similar.
I suspect this is because they don't have contracts with enforceable SLAs yet. When they do, you will see more 'degraded performance'.
People get credits for 'outages', but if it is sometimes working for someone somewhere then that is the convenient fiction/loophole a lot of companies use.
One CFO forced us to use AWS status data for the SLA reports to key clients. One dev was even pulled aside to make a branded page that reported AWS status as our own and made a big deal about forcing support to share the page when a client complained.
Most services have a lot more systems than OpenAI and thus it is degraded performance when a few of them don’t work. Degraded performance isn’t a good thing, I don’t understand the issue with this verbiage.
When a system is completely broken for most end users, some companies call it "degraded performance" when it should be, in fact, called "major outage".
"Degraded performance" means degraded performance, i.e. the system is not as performant as usual, probably manifesting as high API latencies and/or a significant failure rate in the case of some public-facing "cloud" service.
If certain functions of the service are completely unresponsive, i.e. close to 100% failure rate, that's not "degraded performance"---it's a service outage.