lol we posted at the same time

https://status.github.com Says it's online

However, for me it does not load.

Now it says "07:36 CDTMajor service outage."

Seeing the unicorn here on the east coast :(

same in Europe.

same in Chicago

https://trello.com/ down also (EU)

Interestingly I just got the following email 5 times in quick succession:

    Dear <not my name>,

    Your npm package, <a pkg I've contributed to>, has been added to npm cdn: 
    https://npm-cdn.com/pkg/<pgk>/

    npm cdn relieves the burden of publishing your code to 
    a CDN in addition to the npm registry. All you need to 
    do is add a link to https://npm-cdn.com/pkg/<pkg>/ to 
    your README file so that the users of <pkg> could embed 
    up-to-date version of your javascript files to their 
    web apps without additional steps..

Since I've only contributed a patch or two I presume they got my email address from scraping GitHub.

How is this related?

Just when I was doing my pull request.

I've created an Amazon-style GitHub status page here: https://github.com/runeksvendsen/status

When you can't reach this status page, GitHub is down. Otherwise it works fine.

This repo shows as empty for me.

Then Github's up :)

How does that work? It isn't just an empty repo titled "status" that you try to load to see if Github is down, is it?

Note that the person who replied is not the person who owned the repo.

Either this is a case of Put the joke into air ten feet of north of me. Verify the result. or there was an issue with the repo.

If I was doing this I'd be looking at making a real repo with a magic string in its README.md - because there's a big difference between HTTP 200 on / for github.com, and everything working correctly so that magic string displays.

I believe it's a joke.

I missed the "Amazon-style" part in the OP, which I guess is referencing how Amazon used to (?) host their status page.