Large orgs (like Github) don't want or use automated status updates. There is usually always some service having issues in complex systems and immediately updating a public status page does more harm than good, including false alarms which may not affect anything public facing.
More harm than good to the company's own long-term reputation.
A status page is a kind of PR. Think of it like a policy for a flight attendant to come out into the cabin to tell everyone what's going on when the plane encounters turbulence. That policy is Public Relations -driven. You only do it if you expect that it's positive PR, compared to not doing it — i.e. if telling people what's going on is boosting your reputation compared to saying nothing at all.
If a status page just makes your stakeholders think your service is crappy, such that you'd be better off with no status page at all... then why have a status page? It's not doing its job as a PR tool.
I read the line specifically as "The employees can do better; they just don't want to try."
But that's not true. The company could do better. But the individual employees cannot. The individual employees are constrained by the profit motive of the company. They are not allowed by corporate policy to set up automatic status updates, for about the same reason they're not allowed to post their corporate log-in credentials: that the result would very likely be disastrous to the company's bottom line.
(Though, really, the corporations in most verticals are in a race-to-the-bottom in most respects. Even if you treat GitHub as a single entity capable of coherent desires, it probably doesn't desire to avoid automatic status updates. It needs to avoid them, to survive in a competitive market where everyone else is also avoiding them. People — and corporations — do lots of things they don't want to do, to survive.)
