Amazing that down detector manages to stay up during these kinds of outages. Noticed it has been a little slow but they really have done a good job keeping it up even though large portions of the internet is down right now.
It's interesting that they report an AWS outage but there don't seem to be any issues there. Looks like their methodology is a bit too reliant on those speculative tweets from the first 5 minutes of all these sites going down. https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/
> So many websites are down, are AWS servers down or something?
> Amazon web services is down which is affecting a lot of company web sites and services. Not sure what is going on.
> Miss us? @aldotcom and a whole bunch of other folks have been knocked off the internet by what appears to be an AWS attack/system failure. We'll be back. ?
Yep that's my point. I'm guessing that for a lot of sites they can verify if there's an outage pretty easily when they see a spike in reports, but for something like AWS unless they updated their status page (lol) or downdetector ran a bunch of stuff on there just to check with, I guess they don't have a good way to verify it.
Gotcha, yeah I guess I always just considered that out of scope for their service and that it’s just a report aggregator but I suppose you would expect it to be at least a little bit clever based on the “detector” name
You could run a local resolver like dnsmasq or Unbound that can “serve stale” on upstream failures, but that assumes the DNS failure is a client-facing resolver one.
From what I observed here, it was more internal DNS related: Newegg was serving an opaque “DNS failure” error page from Akamai’s front-end which is likely because their infra was failing to resolve names internally.