> In my experience, most large companies do treat not being able to ship code (i.e. deploy to prod) as outages.

In my experience, we treat "not being able to deploy to prod" as an warning light, because our ability to fix an actual issue or outage in prod is impacted.

i.e. if there is a prod issue, then we can often ether fix it in code, or roll back to an earlier release. But we need the deploy pipeline to be working in order to do that. The longer a pipeline outage persists over time and across multiple services, the more likely it is that there will be some impact.

It's like driving without a seatbelt - you're fine so long as nothing else goes wrong, so it's not recommended as a state to stay in.