Yeah. This service was presenting charts likely probed from inside GCP. I was on a call with a Google rep, someone pointed out that "AWS is also down" and I foolishly said something about "possible BGP attack" out of spite, before checking AWS availability myself. Shame on me.
I love this kind of fake news. It's like that scene from Scary Movie (can't remember which one) in which someone says "I heard the japs took out one in Kikoman" :')
Downdetector does not actually monitor the services. It aggregates user reports from socials etc. For large-scale incidents, the reports get really noisy and it will show that basically everything is down.
I thought that was the whole premise of Downdetector, no? User reports, because first-party status updates are tightly controlled by those first parties?
Was not basically everything (hyperbolically speaking, of course) practically impacted today?
How much weight really comes from those social media posts? Is there an indirect effect of people reading these posts, then flocking to hit the report button, sight unseen?