The AWS Status Hotline via Twilio was built by Plushcap after a conversation with Jeff Barr, an AWS evangelist. The hotline allows customers to call in and get the status of S3, EC2, etc., instantly. It was created using Twilio's phone number service, which points to an application URL that fetches HTML from Amazon's status dashboard and parses it to find the desired service's status. However, Plushcap had trouble getting Amazon's RSS feeds to work, as they don't return the status when fetched via PHP. The hotline reads out the status to the caller using TwiML before sending them back to the main menu.