alt Hacker NewsTheir terms of service are legal because their terms of service require YOU, the CUSTOMER, to track their availability against the agreed upon SLA and to pursue credits when they break their SLA.
At a recent gig we experienced many, many GitHub outages that were not tracked on their status page, and we kept a log (i.e. just search in slack). After our business people argued with our account executives at GitHub we got hundreds of dollars of credits.
Then the business peopled complained because hundreds of dollars of credits is not worth their time. And so GitHub continues to have terrible uptime and nothing is done about it.
This. We talked to our account reps and engineering folks at GitHub - they had no monitoring to track if they had kept their end of the contracted SLA.
They expected us to log any faults and as you say the process wasn't worth it - even with massive outages - just for a few beans in credits.
GitHub has low availability simply because it doesn't cost them and they wear no legal or contractual damage from it.
If a competitor came to me and said, we will _pay_ you damages for the time your developers are offline not able to use our product to do their jobs, we would sign up immediately.