Heck, I'm not colorblind and I had trouble seeing the difference between "service disruption" and "service outage" at first in the legend at the bottom of the page.

It wasn't until I zoomed in on them that I could see that one was orange and the other red. Once I saw them zoomed, I could then identify which was which at normal size on the status part of the page.

BTW, the orange circle is actually a span whose class is "aad-yellow-circle", and whose CSS loads the colored circle from the file yellow_circle.png.

This suggests that at one time they intended it to be a yellow circle, not an orange circle [1]. I wonder why they switched from yellow to orange?

[1] Actually, RGB to name sites suggest that it is neon carrot.

If the user had e.g. red/green colorblindness, that wouldn't help. Google's made a nice tradeoff for this application, though, and used differently-shaped icons (checkmark vs. exclamation point) as well.

Edit: looks like the icons are served as images. Google should probably consider making them text icons instead to mitigate loading problems.

FYI, Toptal makes a helpful tool for quickly checking live pages with colorblindness filters: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter/

You're looking at the wrong page. This thread is about https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

Ahhh, got it now, thanks!