How Downdetector Has Become Go-To Site for Online Disruptions (bloomberg.com) 26
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Facebook's platforms went down early on Oct. 4, the online tracker Downdetector was among the first places users looked to find out what was happening. Downdetector, which uses crowdsourcing to track outages, recognized Facebook's problems were dramatically different than a typical outage. Its system automatically released a notification, including a tweet, informing the internet of the disruption. The outage was among the biggest ever declared by Downdetector, said Luke Deryckx, chief technology officer at closely held Ookla LLC, the Seattle-based company that owns it. "Downdetector is a vehicle for users to report their experience," he said, adding that the company crowdsources "users' relationship with the internet." "In this case, we'd received a clear and almost instantaneous signal that there was a Facebook-related outage."
The idea of Downdetector was born over drinks at a bar in Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands, in February 2012. Tom Sanders and Sander van de Graaf were both working at IDG Communications Inc., the media publisher of magazines including CIO and Computerworld. Van de Graaf was a developer, and Sanders was the editor in chief. Readers would often call the newsroom to report an online outage at a company or service provider, but the reporters would often get no response -- or have to wait hours -- when they called to ask about the disruption. "We thought, wouldn't there be ways to automate this so we didn't have to check with the press office and we could get the data directly ourselves?" Van de Graaf said.
The idea of Downdetector was born over drinks at a bar in Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands, in February 2012. Tom Sanders and Sander van de Graaf were both working at IDG Communications Inc., the media publisher of magazines including CIO and Computerworld. Van de Graaf was a developer, and Sanders was the editor in chief. Readers would often call the newsroom to report an online outage at a company or service provider, but the reporters would often get no response -- or have to wait hours -- when they called to ask about the disruption. "We thought, wouldn't there be ways to automate this so we didn't have to check with the press office and we could get the data directly ourselves?" Van de Graaf said.
But what will we do if it goes down? (Score:2)
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I suspect the White House will call a press conference letting us know.
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I went to Downdetector first and Twitter second.
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Reddit for me unless Reddit is down, then I have to use its https://www.redditstatus.com/ [redditstatus.com] and https://twitter.com/redditstat... [twitter.com]. ;)
Re: But what will we do if it goes down? (Score:2)
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But what will we do if it goes down?
If I think a major could provider is having issues, I usually check /sysadmins on reddit and sort by new. If a big service provider is down, it usually pops up there pretty quick. And yes, that sadly includes FB as there are plenty of websites that rely on its APIs, and some businesses use FB Messenger for business (I wish that was a joke, but it's not, I have personally worked with one company using it).
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Advertising for DownDetector (Score:4, Interesting)
There are probably many of these.
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Yeah, I never heard of Down Detector. Though "[Is it] down for everyone or just me" is not my favorite URL. Do the omitted words make it harder to remember for everyone or just me?
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even the concept is just so 80s, "just me". anyone born around a console or a mobile phone has enough intuitive awareness of network behavior to know better. which makes it a poor domain name for the function. besides, as noted elsewhere, you just have to google "x down" and dozens of results will pop up. i'm a boomer myself so i'll assume i get a free camaraderie pass on calling you boomer :-P
How will I know if DownDetector is down? (Score:1)
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https://www.isitdownrightnow.c... [isitdownrightnow.com]. :-D
https://twitter.com/downdetect... [twitter.com]
https://updownradar.com/status... [updownradar.com]
But easiest of all, you can just use your brain and Google, which is how I found the above things. Oh. Unless Google were down. Then, the internet is dead. Yep.
DownDetector was the only site working (Score:2)
I tried each of the "is it down" sites on Google's first page of results, and they were all timing out except for DownDetector. DD got sluggish pretty quickly too.
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When asked how is Facebook doing, the various servers made a noise startlingly like that of an alarmed chicken, then burst into flames...
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I heard a lot of websites were slowed down while all their embedded Facebook bugs timed out.
SEO (Score:2)
Um, duh? (Score:4, Interesting)
"How Downdetector Has Become Go-To Site for Online Disruptions" ....I'm going to guess it's become the 'go to' because they paid Google to have them as the first result in "is (whatever).com down" queries?
This isn't rocket science, really.
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And its pretty crappy for understanding if something is down anyway.
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I've used this site a number of times.... (Score:2)
At various workplaces, we'd notice a site we needed became unresponsive (like an admin panel for O365, for example) and downdetector was one of the first sites that would come up in searches looking for others describing similar outages. That's how I first learned it existed, and started using it after that.
I'm sure there are other good alternatives -- but the most useful feature I found w/downdetector was the ability for people to leave short comments after confirming a site isn't working for them. We cou
DownDetector (Score:1)