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by cbono1 1794 days ago
Why would Google and Amazon be on the downdetector list or experiencing issues? Don't they have their own DNS / nameservers separate from Akamai?
1 comments

because the way downdetector works is it just basically counts how many people are searching/visiting for <site> down and if it's much higher than typical it flags the site as down.

So if everyone searched "is google down" and visited the link on downdetector that was returned in the search, that would add to the downdetector count for that site.

Downdetector doesn't actually know if the site is up or down.

I found this hard to believe, but it's correct.

Downdetector only reports an issue if a significant number of users are impacted. To that end, Downdetector calculates a baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service monitored, based on the average number of reports for that given time of day over the last year. Downdetector’s incident detection system compares the current number of problem reports to this baseline and only reports an issue if the current volume significantly exceeds the typical volume of reports.

https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/how-downdetector-wor...

What’s hard to believe? Downdetectors well known for being almost, but not quite, useless.

Probably reported Google as “down” because a whole bunch of people use the word “Google” when they mean “internet”.

A more proper name might be PeopleThinkItsDownDetector.com
Not nearly as SEO friendly
So how do they reset status? The number of queries going down signifies return to normal status?
Some CEO calls another CEO and makes a deal?
Yep