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  1. Home
  2. /Story
  3. /Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
  1. Home
  2. /Story
  3. /Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
Nov 18, 2025 at 7:05 PM EST

Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

gusowen
581 points
169 comments

Mood

skeptical

Sentiment

mixed

Category

tech

Key topics

Outage Detection

Website Monitoring

Meta-Humor

Debate intensity60/100
After down detector went down with the rest of the internet during the Cloudflare outage today I decided to build a robust, independent tool which checks if down detector is down. Enjoy!!

The author created a website to detect outages on DownDetector, sparking a discussion about the utility and legitimacy of such a meta-tool, with some users questioning its practicality and others appreciating its novelty.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Very active discussion

First comment

7h

Peak period

158

Day 1

Avg / period

80

Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...

Based on 160 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    Nov 18, 2025 at 7:05 PM EST

    5d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    Nov 19, 2025 at 1:39 AM EST

    7h after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    158 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    Nov 19, 2025 at 11:50 PM EST

    4d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (169 comments)
Showing 160 comments of 169
ulf-77723
5d ago
1 reply
Nice! Who doesn’t like a good recursion? Fingers crossed that the down detector for down detector won’t be down, when down detector might be down
kijin
5d ago
Use the original down detector to monitor the down detector for down detector for down detector. Complete the circle!
jesperwe
5d ago
1 reply
Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1
cortesoft
4d ago
I remember when the CDN I was working for had to change our status page provider when our first one became our client.
cweagans
5d ago
1 reply
Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D
johnisgood
4d ago
1 reply
But who is going to watch him?!
PunchyHamster
4d ago
his cat. at least when he's on toilet
ZeroConcerns
5d ago
1 reply
Thank you for your service! Now, for an even bigger challenge: since it seems the increased demand for the Cloudflare status page brought down Amazon CloudFront for a bit as well, build a new CDN capable of handling that load as well...
carstenhag
5d ago
1 reply
Do you need a CDN for a static html, no images? I would guess no, even if you.are being bombarded with requests
ZeroConcerns
4d ago
1 reply
I would guess yes, unless you have a server with unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity to every other AS...
amelius
4d ago
1 reply
But CDNs are made for static content so your comment means I can't run a dynamic website unless I have unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity.
benregenspan
4d ago
"Need" is a strong word. But I think the point is that if you expect wildly spikey traffic/don't want the site to go down if it receives a very sudden influx of requests, going static is a very good answer, much cheaper than "serverless" or over-provisioning.
4ndrewl
5d ago
7 replies
But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.

It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.

thinkingemote
4d ago
2 replies
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/
sd8f9iu
4d ago
3 replies
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....
ritzaco
4d ago
3 replies
who is going to throw $10 at

https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...

rft
4d ago
1 reply
Had to check, but that is actually beyond what DNS allows. Labels (the part between dots) are limited to 63 characters. We could sneakily drop an s somewhere in there and then it would fit.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035

Also I think I triggered a nice error log in domaintools just now. https://whois.domaintools.com/downdetectorsdowndetectorsdown...

cortesoft
4d ago
1 reply
Have to use more efficient notation - downdetectorsx5.com
chuckadams
4d ago
fix.downdetectors.com
jMyles
4d ago
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I keep coming back to check. :-)
callamdelaney
4d ago
Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?
johnisgood
4d ago
1 reply
It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(
ProtoAES256
4d ago
It says down now correctly :D
joasto
4d ago
1 reply
4xDowndetector lol
insin
4d ago
The Internet is back!
wltr
4d ago
It was worth the laugh, thanks!
Nevermark
5d ago
Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.
neoCrimeLabs
4d ago
It's down detectors all the way down
rozenmd
4d ago
here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...

Looks like it's hosted in London?

meken
4d ago
We could create a linked list of these and just refer to the N’th one as N-down detector.
bell-cot
4d ago
Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.

From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph

hirako2000
4d ago
It's a centralization vs decentralisation vs distributed system question.

Since down detectors serve to detect failures of centralized (and decentralized systems) the idea would be to at least get that right: a distributed system to detect outages.

You basically run detectors that heartbeat each others. Just a few suffice.

Once you start to see clusters of detectors go silent, you can assume things are falling apart, which is fine so long as a few remain.

Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.

ricq
5d ago
2 replies
Is it hosted on Cloudflare?
mcny
4d ago
1 reply
I feel like the classic East Dakota reply would be that cloud flare CDN does not host your data and merely proxies it (bonus points if he uses the words "mere conduit" in his reply and therefore cloud flare can't be held responsible yada yada).

Jokes aside, as far as I can tell, https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare CDN/Proxy

https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare SSL

However, selesti reports it uses cloudflare DNS?

https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=https://downdetect...

https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is using Cloudflare DNS!

Checked 8 global locations, found DNS entries for Cloudflare in 3

Found in: England, Russia, USA

Not found in: China, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Netherlands

xp84
4d ago
That won’t be an issue though - as we all know, DNS is rarely related to cloud failures
PunchyHamster
4d ago
of course, adding to the joke
spyridonas
5d ago
15 replies
As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year.

Cloudflare > Bunny.net

AWS > Hetzner

Business email > Infomaniak

Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.

buildfocus
4d ago
1 reply
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
moooo99
4d ago
1 reply
+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
moffkalast
4d ago
1 reply
-1 for Scaleway, they were a really good deal years ago but have become expensive af
tuetuopay
4d ago
well they're not comparable to hetzner anymore, both in terms of features and price. only their dedibox brand could compare, as it's the classic hosting approach vs cloud.

for the hobby crowd it's a shame, for a corporation it's still cheaper than aws with the extra bonus of not having any tie to the us.

graemep
4d ago
9 replies
Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between).

Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go wrong.

A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.

amelius
4d ago
1 reply
> Less complexity to go wrong.

This sounds like a good thing.

graemep
4d ago
1 reply
It is, in itself.

It does mean that you get fewer services, you have to do more sysadmin internally or use other providers for those which a lot of people are very reluctant to do.

amelius
4d ago
1 reply
I bet most people don't even need the extra features.
graemep
4d ago
1 reply
When forced to use AWS I only use the extra features I am specifically told to or that are already in use in order to make the system less tied to AWS and easier for me to manage (I am not an AWS specialist so its easier for me to just run stuff like I would on any server or VPS). I particularly dislike RDS (of things I have used). I like Lightsail because its reasonably priced and very like just getting a VPS.

S3 is something of an exception, but it does not tie you down (everyone provides block storage now, and you can use S3 even if everything else is somewhere else) for me if storing lots of large files that are not accessed very much (so egress fees are low).

mhb
4d ago
1 reply
Looking forward to the Show HN: I built a web site that uses all of AWS services.
marcosdumay
4d ago
That would be an expensive Show HN.
hoppp
4d ago
1 reply
I think cloudflare has billions worth of incentives to be reliable however they can slip up, it happens and that's why centralization is bad.
graemep
4d ago
1 reply
That is true.

However, I would say that the effect of this outage on customer retention will be (relatively) smaller than it would be for a smaller CDN.

MiscIdeaMaker99
4d ago
1 reply
Maybe? Maybe not? It depends on the nature of the outage and how motivated their customers are to switch over to a new service.
littlestymaar
4d ago
1 reply
The good news is that we're just living in a perfect natural experiment:

Cloudflare just caused a massive internet outage costing millions of dollars worldwide, in part due to a very sloppy mistake that definitely ought to have been prevented (using Rust's “unwrap” in production ). Let's see how many customers they lose because of that and we'll see how big are their incentives. (If you look at the evolution of their share value, it doesn't look like the incident terrified their shareholders at least…)

AznHisoka
4d ago
That experiment already happened last year with Crowdstrike. Nothing detrimental happened. Their revenue actually increased and stock went up
Krutonium
4d ago
2 replies
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.

That's an incredibly bad take lol.

There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.

I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.

Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.

TheCraiggers
4d ago
1 reply
> I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.

I don't think they'd care. Companies only care about one thing: stock price. Everything rolls up into that. If AWS got hacked and said company was affected by it, it wouldn't be a big deal because they'd be one of many and they'd be lost in the crowd. Any hit to their stock/profits would be minimal and easily forgotten about.

Now, if they were on prem or hosted with Bob's Cloud and got hacked? Different story altogether.

graemep
4d ago
1 reply
> Companies only care about one thing: stock price.

Its rarely affected in any case. Take a look at the Crowdstrike price chart (or revenue or profits). I think most people (including investors) just take it for granted that systems are unreliable and regard it as something you live with.

TheCraiggers
4d ago
I think that's more of a indicator that it hasn't effected their business. They lost nearly 1/5 of their stock price after that incident (obviously not accounting for other factors; I'm not a stock analyst). Investors thought they'd lose customers and reacted in obvious fashion.

But it's since been restored. According to the news, they lost very little customers over the incident. That is why their stock came back. If they continued having problems, I doubt it would have been so rosy. So yes, to your point, a blip here or there happens.

NetMageSCW
4d ago
1 reply
Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.
protocolture
4d ago
>Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.

A large number of cloud customers dont need the complexity that the cloud can offer. Like, yes, its hard to 1:1 feature replicate the cloud. But so many people just have some VMs and some routes.

giancarlostoro
4d ago
2 replies
> A lot of people want the brand recognition too.

Not to mention the familiarity of the company, its services and expectations. You can hire people with experience with AWS, Azure or GCP, but the more niche you go, the higher the possibility that some people you hire might not know how to work with those systems and their nuances, which is fine they can learn as they work, but that adds to ramp up time and could lead to inadvertent mistakes happening.

dirkc
4d ago
1 reply
This could also be an anti-pattern for hiring - getting people with Amazing Web Service (tm) certification and missing out on candidates with a solid understanding of the foundational principles these services are built on
giancarlostoro
4d ago
I agree, though the industry does this all the time by hiring someone with a degree vs someone who built key infrastructure and has no degree, solely because they have a degree. Remember, the creator of brew couldn't get past a Google interview because they asked him to hand craft some algorithm, I probably would have not done well with those either. Does that make him or me worse developers? Doubtful. Does it mean Google missed out on hiring someone who loves his craft? Yes.
graemep
4d ago
1 reply
I think that is often the perception, but is usually mistaken.

Smaller providers tend to have simpler systems so it only adds to ramp up time if you hire someone who only knows AWS or whatever. Simpler also means fewer mistakes.

If you stick to a simple set of services (e.g. VPS or containers + object storage) there are very few service specific nuances.

giancarlostoro
4d ago
They also have the risk factor of leaving the market entirely as well, and you having to scramble to pick up the pieces.
mbesto
4d ago
1 reply
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

Hard disagree. A smaller provider will think twice about whether they use a Tier 1 data center versus a Tier IV data center because the cost difference is substantial and in many cases prohibitively expensive.

sigmoid10
4d ago
1 reply
This. There's a fundamental logic error here. You simply don't hear about downtimes at smaller providers that often because it doesn't affect a significant portion of the internet like it does e.g. for AWS. But that doesn't mean they are more stable in general.
itake
4d ago
yeah, I'd like to see hard data on uptimes / reliability between these 2 services before declaring that big = bad and small = good.

FlyIO (and Digital Ocean) had horrible up-time when they first got started. In the last 6-12 months, FlyIO been much better. But they would go down all the time or have unexpected CI bugs/changes.

Digital Ocean accidentally hard deleted user's object stores before their IPO.

pksebben
4d ago
1 reply
There is this weird thing that happens with hyperscale - the combination of highly central decision-making, extreme interconnection / interdependence of parts, and the attractiveness of lots of money all conspire to create a system pulled by unstable attractors to a fracturing point (slowed / mitigated at least a little by the inertia of such a large ship).

Are smaller scale services more reliable? I think that's too simple a question to be relevant. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we know one thing for sure - when smaller services go down the impact radius is contained. When a corrupt MBA who wants to pump short term metrics for a bonus gains power, the damage they can do is similarly contained. All risk factors are boxed in like this. With a hyperscale business, things are capable of going much more wrong for many more people, and the recursive nature of vertical+horizontal integration causes a calamity engine that can be hard to correct.

Take the financial sector in 08. Huge monoliths that had integrated every kind of financial service with every other kind of financial service. Few points of failure, every failure mode exposed to every other failure mode.

There's a reason asymmetric warfare is hard for both parties - cellular networks of small units that can act independently are extremely fault tolerant and robust against changing conditions. Giants, when they fall, do so in spectacular fashion.

KK7NIL
4d ago
2 replies
Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug?

If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions.

But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on an API that runs on their cloud!

smaudet
4d ago
2 replies
> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature

It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away).

The real problem is not having a fail-over provider. Modern software is so abstracted (tens, hundreds, even thousands of layers), and yet we still make the mistake of depending on one, two layers to make things "go".

When your one small provider goes down, no problem, switch over to your other provider. Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...

KK7NIL
4d ago
Very few online services are so essential that they require a fail-over plan for an AWS outage, so this is just plain over-engineering.

> Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...

Let's not stroke our egos too much here, mkay?

NetMageSCW
4d ago
That just leads to an upstream single point of failure.
yfw
4d ago
Depends on your customers understanding that. We had a gym with 'smart' pilates machines that went down. Hard to explain to them the cloud is involved
runjake
4d ago
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

I disagree because conversely, outages for larger providers cause millions or maybe even billions of dollars in losses for its customers. They might be more "stuck" in their current providers' proprietary schemes, but these kinds of losses will cause them to move away, or at least diversify cloud providers. In turn, this will cause income losses to the cloud provider.

simultsop
4d ago
And they sell when get big but can't afford to be.
codexon
4d ago
I've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.

First I used an ex101 with an i9-13900. Within a week it just froze. It could not be reset remotely. Nothing in kern.log. Support offered no solution but a hard reboot. No mention of what might be wrong other than user error.

A few months later, one of the drives just disconnects from raid by itself. It took support 1 hour to respond and they said they found no issue so it must be my fault.

Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.

It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

herbst
4d ago
2 replies
Big fan of bunny.net as CDN, however Cloudflare is my "smart" filter for all kind of attacks, AI scrapers, malicious traffic, etc.

Am I missing something or is bunny.net not actually a replacement for that?

Stoo
4d ago
1 reply
They've recently introduced bunny.net Shield to add a security layer. I've not made use of it yet so I don't know what the coverage is like or how effective it is: https://bunny.net/shield/
herbst
4d ago
This is very interesting. Thank you for making me aware!
benatkin
4d ago
That component is what keeps me from using Cloudflare for anything. Not because it exists, but because the way it's run is terrible for the open web: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
baaron
4d ago
1 reply
As an American solo developer, I am close to doing the same. These mega-corps are out of control.
bananalychee
4d ago
Out of control in what way?
GordonS
4d ago
4 replies
Are you using a US-based transactional email service like Twilio? Curious about EU-based alternatives.
pydubreucq
4d ago
1 reply
Hello, You can test Sweego - https://www.sweego.io/ We (I'm the CTO) are fully European Bye Pierre-Yves
tacker2000
4d ago
nice, im looking to ditch SES, one of the last services i have running on AWS
albertgoeswoof
4d ago
1 reply
https://mailpace.com is fully European based and independent
mosselman
4d ago
1 reply
They are based in the UK. That is technically Europe, but I believe for privacy regulations it isn't the same as a EU-country, but I could be very wrong. Would love to be educated on this by someone.
albertgoeswoof
4d ago
UK inherited the same gdpr from the EU, so practically it remains the same.

MailPace data is also hosted in the EU only

smashah
4d ago
There are self hostable alts to twillio
supz_k
4d ago
Hyvor Relay (https://github.com/hyvor/relay) can be self-hosted. We are planning a cloud version for 2026. (I am a co-founder)
nonethewiser
4d ago
1 reply
AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.

You can use whatever infrastructure you want for whatever reason, but you may not have an accurate picture of the availability.

monooso
4d ago
2 replies
> AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.

This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year.

That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.

count
4d ago
1 reply
My clients (extremely large) AWS based infrastructure experienced no downtime this year. So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.

I don't use cloud flare for anything, so no comment there.

monooso
4d ago
1 reply
> So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.

Valid. I should have made it clear that I meant "clearly better from GP's perspective."

nonethewiser
4d ago
Clearly better than what though?
nonethewiser
4d ago
>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year

That's the least useful information.

What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.

sp4cec0wb0y
4d ago
American solo developer here. Moved to Hetzner two months ago. They have servers in Oregon for west coast people. My storage box is in Germany but that is okay, it is for backups.
INTPenis
4d ago
Do you have anything for device management? Like managing local admin accounts on Linux, Macintosh and Windows? I'm afraid we'll have to use InTune.
valevk
4d ago
How does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
lilydjwg
4d ago
Earlier this year, a Hetzner server I manage was shutdown, and after I started it via the console, it booted to a rescue system. In the same month, it was rebooted without a reason. There was some maintenance notice but the server was not listed as impacted.

Note that I'm not saying Hetzner is bad. Just incidents happen in Europe too. The server didn't have a lot of issues like this over the years.

spiderfarmer
4d ago
Same here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so many sites were down.
cortesoft
4d ago
I feel like a year is too short a time frame to measure reliability.
moffkalast
4d ago
> Bunny.net

Ah yes, the place for RabbitMQ endpoints.

alecco
4d ago
This is worth its own post.
supz_k
4d ago
We are also looking to migrate off Cloudflare. I thought Bunny.net was mostly a pure CDN, not a reverse proxy like Cloudflare. Am I wrong? One of the most important things for us would be DDoS protection.
makach
4d ago
1 reply
Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.
fragmede
4d ago
What are you, an LLM? You point the first one at the second one and create a loop instead of an infinite "one more" chain
jakub_g
4d ago
2 replies
Semi-related: Datadog recently created https://updog.ai
passivepinetree
4d ago
I'm curious if this site actually uses AI in some form or if it's just the hot TLD at the moment. There's no mention of AI on the page itself.
yahoozoo
4d ago
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew
mylons
4d ago
11 replies
This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.

but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector

PunchyHamster
4d ago
1 reply
See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1 so they all go down together anyway
bryanrasmussen
4d ago
pervs.
falcor84
4d ago
2 replies
I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.
Waterluvian
4d ago
1 reply
> Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Arbites.

falcor84
4d ago
1 reply
"To serve the Emperor. To protect His domains. To judge and stand guard over His subjects. To carry the Emperor's law to all worlds under His blessed protection. To pursue and punish those who trespassed against His word."
mylons
4d ago
i love you guys.
mylons
4d ago
haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.
eYrKEC2
4d ago
1 reply
You're on that site right now!
bombcar
4d ago
HN is the true down detector - if HN is down TCP is down.
mproud
4d ago
1 reply
I think the original down detectors do
jl6
4d ago
Mutually assured down-detection.
MattSayar
4d ago
https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/downdetectorsdowndetector.c...
joelhaasnoot
4d ago
Time for the META Down Detector - detecting which of the three is down
state_less
4d ago
There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.

https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo

vismit2000
4d ago
http://factoryfactoryfactory.net/
excalibur
4d ago
It's detectors all the way down.
philipwhiuk
4d ago
Or "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
graemep
4d ago
Can down detector not detect whether down detector detector is down or not?

Maybe distributed down detection?

I know there are people here perfectly capable of running with that idea and we might just see a distributed down detector announced on HN :)

Retr0id
4d ago
1 reply
How does it detect up-ness?

Downdetector was indeed down during the cf outage, but I think the index page was still returning 200 (although I didn't check).

Running a headless browser to take a screenshot to check would probably get you blocked by cf...

omoikane
4d ago
It just fakes it as far as I can tell.

script.js calls `fetchStatus()`, which calls `generateMockStatus()` to get the statuses, which just makes up random response times:

    // ---- generate deterministic mock data for the current 3-min window ----

    function generateMockStatus() {
      const bucket = getCurrentBucket();
      const rng = createRng(bucket);

      // "Virtual now" = middle of this 3-minute bucket
      const virtualNowMs = bucket * BUCKET_MS + BUCKET_MS / 2;

      // Checked a few minutes ago (2–5 min, plus random seconds)
      const minutesOffset = randomInt(rng, 2, 5);
      const secondsOffset = randomInt(rng, 0, 59);
      const checkedAtMs =
        virtualNowMs - minutesOffset * 60_000 - secondsOffset * 1000;
      const checkedAtDate = new Date(checkedAtMs);

      return {
        checkedAt: checkedAtDate.toISOString(),
        target: "https://downdetector.com/",
        regions: [
          {
            name: "London, UK",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 250, 550),
            error: null
          },
          {
            name: "Auckland, NZ",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 300, 650),
            error: null
          },
          {
            name: "New York, US",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 380, 800),
            error: null
          }
        ]
      };
    }
mhb
4d ago
2 replies
Three down detectors walk into a bar. The bartender asks them if they're all up. The first says "I don't know". The second says "I don't know". The third says "Yes".
oniony
4d ago
Presumably they're blind down detectors.
khasan222
4d ago
Crying. I’m stealing this.
theturtlemoves
4d ago
isisitdowndown.com is still free
dapoyo
4d ago
I had this same idea when I got the "Unblock challenges.cloudflare.com" error while trying to access downdetector, lol!

It looks really nice, good job!

andreygrehov
4d ago
Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha
zoidb
4d ago
there is also https://isdowndetectordown.com/
pytlicek
4d ago
I have similar project like this: https://hostbeat.info/ More like t uptime robot and sure, I was really surprised yesterday how many alerts I have got and how many notifications were sent yesterday for this system users. Good work anyway
alentred
4d ago
Niiice! Thank you for the laugh.

I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)

As the Web becomes more and more entangled, I don't know if there is any guarantee of what is really independent. We should make a diagram of this. Hopefully no cyclic dependencies there yet.

spiffyk
4d ago
Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me
gblargg
5d ago
Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s
sleight42
4d ago
I know this is a shitpost but someone has to say it:

Yo dawg I hear you like downdetector so...

SeanAnderson
4d ago
https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)
tonymet
4d ago
the internet can be divided up into factions like Divergent. AWSubbies (orange), Azure-ants (blue), CloudFlaricons (black) & the Rogues (jester colors, like Google). A proper down detector would identify platform outages based on the number of faction members who are down.
isaachinman
4d ago
No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.
goopypoop
5d ago
and i still can't find any feathers
josteink
4d ago
If my checks are correct, this site uses Cloudflare for DNS and AWS for hosting.

So if any of the things you want to know is down is down, chances are this site will be too ;)

p_v_doom
4d ago
quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?
jojobas
4d ago
Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for good measure.
Brajeshwar
5d ago
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”
josefresco
4d ago
I randomly started vibe coding a website monitoring tool last week knowing full well about the mature competitors in this space and questioning myself along the way. Doesn't seem so crazy now.
debo_
4d ago
Things might soon get bad enough that we will start calling them "up detectors."
BrenBarn
5d ago
Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.
moi2388
4d ago
How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?
mobilene
4d ago
It's stuff like this that makes me still love the Internet.
mrbluecoat
4d ago
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670
calebm
4d ago
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
_nickwhite
4d ago
I think an important caveat here is that down detector was not actually down, the cloudflare human verification component was (AFAIK). I wonder if this downdetector down detector accounts for that aspect? It was technically "not down" but still unusable.
waffletower
4d ago
I made a picture of myself taking a picture of myself taking a picture of my self in a mirror... at some point I solved my halting problem and walked away.

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