[jordanthoms]

That's kinda the point though isn't it? DownDetector is showing an early indication of a major outage in both of your examples. The issue may not be caused by the indicated service, but it's still a useful information source especially when we can correlate reports on there with what we are seeing in our internal monitoring.

[ceejayoz]

A big spike on DownDetector is an indication of something going on.

Its attribution of what/who is often incorrect. You'll see "maybe it's more than Big Site X!" comments come up on every HN thread like this citing DownDetector; it's almost never the case, and folks on HN should know better.