"Adding a service like StatusPage, which launched three years ago, seems like a natural fit for Atlassian."
Why is this a natural fit for Atlassian? Not being snarky, I just don't see how this is any more a natural fit for Atlassian than lots of other companies that provide picks-and-shovels to the software builders of the world.
Atlassian has tooling around handling support (Service Desk), bug tracking (Jira), and I think it seems like a natural extension to integrate those products into an external facing service like StatusPage.
One problem with the stack right now is if you are using Jira to track issues internally then users who aren't party to the ticket aren't able to see what's going on very easily. Perhaps/hopefully this will provide that sort of ongoing progress report, so if the database goes down there aren't 50 support tickets.
Because Atlassian's core skills these days seem to be oriented towards getting enterprises to buy their software.
Their products are decent enough, but certainly not exceptional. Their pace of development has slowed to a crawl. The word on the street is that they're pouring massive investment into HipChat, yet it's been easily outdone by Slack.
Yet, they're doing well, because they manage to package it all up at just the right price point, with just the right set of services to get people to buy it.
Something like StatusPage fits them well because it's an existing, working, solution that they can monetize.
Must be a problem with your installation. I've used Jira at 2 separate companies and it never went down (it was purposefully restarted a few times a year to apply updates).
Edit: I see that HipChat's reliability is a big issue for several posters, maybe your installation has that. The ones I've used were fairly basic.
Why is this a natural fit for Atlassian? Not being snarky, I just don't see how this is any more a natural fit for Atlassian than lots of other companies that provide picks-and-shovels to the software builders of the world.