Leo stared at his screen. His latest video essay—on the fragile economics of indie game preservation—had been processing for six hours. The progress bar hadn’t moved in three. He’d tweeted at support, checked his local connection, even restarted his router. Nothing.

The post went viral—not because of his video essay, but because thousands of remote workers, streamers, and devs had been waiting for someone to say it out loud.

Leo blinked. Right. The status page.

He opened a new tab and typed the name of his cloud render service. But halfway through, he paused. “Which one?” he muttered. There were a dozen clone sites promising uptime stats, but most were ad farms.