[jon-wood]

I see we’re still using Down Detector as a source for stories, which may as well be called People Are Talking on Twitter Detector. It doesn’t do anything smart, it’s just looking for keywords on social media, sometimes by coincidence this indicates an actual outage.

[1970-01-01]

If it's stupid but it works it isn't stupid. Many S3 outages are on Down Detector minutes before the AWS status page reacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41770111

[viraptor]

Or are there at all. AWS status page likes to be fully green, even during issues...

[nailer]

Was about to say the same. So many of my colleagues looki] for officially confirmed statuses if a cloud provider, AI, blockchain or github starts acting funny and troubleshooting problems thinking it's their own systems. My response is: did you check for people talking on X? About half an hour later there's an official incident.

[dave78]

Yeah, it's far from ideal, but in my experience its accuracy is better than most anything else readily available, including the official status pages maintained by most tech companies.

[user_7832]

Yeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports. Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very recent issue - even before downdetector itself recognizes it as such.

Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.

[jon-wood]

It's fine in simpler cases but as we're seeing here, is absolutely useless at providing information on failures in complex systems. It appears that it was one network suffering issues but this was then reported as "EVERY MOBILE NETWORK IN THE UK IS DOWN" because people just go "I tried to make a call and it didn't connect". That could be anything from a single cell tower being hit by a truck to a nationwide power outage.

[avalys]

Actually it’s quite smart! Probably the smartest possible solution to the problem they tried to solve.

“Smart” doesn’t have to mean complex and technically sophisticated.

[NitpickLawyer]

Google can detect flu break-outs much faster than the CDC for example, because people tend to search for symptoms before they let anyone know officially, visit a doctor, etc.

[teeray]

Down Detector will be useful as long as marketing departments control official status pages.

[whalesalad]

Do you have a better suggestion? This is the best we can get, without having a public protocol for asking any service, "are you alive?"

[ElijahLynn]

People submit reports through down detector.