[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
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!!
Author : gusowen
Score : 520 points
Date : 2025-11-19 00:05 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (downdetectorsdowndetector.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (downdetectorsdowndetector.com)
| ulf-77723 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Use the original down detector to monitor the down detector for
| down detector for down detector. Complete the circle!
| jesperwe wrote:
| Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the
| Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1
| cortesoft wrote:
| I remember when the CDN I was working for had to change our
| status page provider when our first one became our client.
| cweagans wrote:
| Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is
| "@gusowen". :D
| johnisgood wrote:
| But who is going to watch him?!
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| his cat. at least when he's on toilet
| gblargg wrote:
| Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this
| watching the first one? /s
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you need a CDN for a static html, no images? I would guess
| no, even if you.are being bombarded with requests
| ZeroConcerns wrote:
| I would guess yes, unless you have a server with unlimited
| file descriptors and flawless connectivity to every other
| AS...
| amelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.
|
| It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It
| would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/
| wltr wrote:
| It was worth the laugh, thanks!
| sd8f9iu wrote:
| https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector..
| ..
| ritzaco wrote:
| who is going to throw $10 at
|
| https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector
| s...
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?
| jMyles wrote:
| I don't know if I'm the only one, but I keep coming back
| to check. :-)
| rft wrote:
| 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/downdetectorsdown
| detectorsdown...
| cortesoft wrote:
| Have to use more efficient notation - downdetectorsx5.com
| chuckadams wrote:
| fix.downdetectors.com
| johnisgood wrote:
| It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is
| down. :(
| ProtoAES256 wrote:
| It says down now correctly :D
| joasto wrote:
| 4xDowndetector lol
| insin wrote:
| The Internet is back!
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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
| rozenmd wrote:
| here's a page that monitors _that_ page:
| https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...
|
| Looks like it's hosted in London?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| 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.
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| It's down detectors all the way down
| meken wrote:
| We could create a linked list of these and just refer to the
| N'th one as N-down detector.
| ricq wrote:
| Is it hosted on Cloudflare?
| mcny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That won't be an issue though - as we all know, DNS is rarely
| related to cloud failures
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| of course, adding to the joke
| goopypoop wrote:
| and i still can't find any feathers
| spyridonas wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Bunny.net
|
| Ah yes, _the_ place for RabbitMQ endpoints.
| buildfocus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| +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 wrote:
| -1 for Scaleway, they were a really good deal years ago but
| have become expensive af
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Less complexity to go wrong.
|
| This sounds like a good thing.
| graemep wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I bet most people don't even need the extra features.
| graemep wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Looking forward to the Show HN: I built a web site that
| uses all of AWS services.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That would be an expensive Show HN.
| hoppp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That experiment already happened last year with
| Crowdstrike. Nothing detrimental happened. Their revenue
| actually increased and stock went up
| Krutonium wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They also have the risk factor of leaving the market
| entirely as well, and you having to scramble to pick up
| the pieces.
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| simultsop wrote:
| And they sell when get big but can't afford to be.
| pksebben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That just leads to an upstream single point of failure.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| 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?
| yfw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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.
| codexon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is very interesting. Thank you for making me aware!
| benatkin wrote:
| 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/202
| 5/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
| valevk wrote:
| How does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more
| office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
| alecco wrote:
| This is worth its own post.
| baaron wrote:
| As an American solo developer, I am close to doing the same.
| These mega-corps are out of control.
| bananalychee wrote:
| Out of control in what way?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Same here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so
| many sites were down.
| GordonS wrote:
| Are you using a US-based transactional email service like
| Twilio? Curious about EU-based alternatives.
| smashah wrote:
| There are self hostable alts to twillio
| pydubreucq wrote:
| Hello, You can test Sweego - https://www.sweego.io/ We (I'm
| the CTO) are fully European Bye Pierre-Yves
| tacker2000 wrote:
| nice, im looking to ditch SES, one of the last services i
| have running on AWS
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| https://mailpace.com is fully European based and independent
| mosselman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| UK inherited the same gdpr from the EU, so practically it
| remains the same.
|
| MailPace data is also hosted in the EU only
| supz_k wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Clearly better than what though?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >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._
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| 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.
| lilydjwg wrote:
| 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.
| supz_k wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I feel like a year is too short a time frame to measure
| reliability.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| "Well, who's gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?"
| theturtlemoves wrote:
| isisitdowndown.com is still free
| p_v_doom wrote:
| quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?
| alentred wrote:
| 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.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670
| makach wrote:
| Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a
| downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Semi-related: Datadog recently created https://updog.ai
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Obligatory: https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew
| passivepinetree wrote:
| 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.
| jojobas wrote:
| Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for
| good measure.
| mylons wrote:
| This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.
|
| but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector
| detecting the down detector
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1
| so they all go down together anyway
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| pervs.
| state_less wrote:
| There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a
| bop.
|
| https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Or "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
| graemep wrote:
| 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 :)
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
|
| Arbites.
| falcor84 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| i love you guys.
| mylons wrote:
| 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.
| joelhaasnoot wrote:
| Time for the META Down Detector - detecting which of the three
| is down
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| You're on that site right now!
| bombcar wrote:
| HN is the true down detector - if HN is down TCP is down.
| excalibur wrote:
| It's detectors all the way down.
| mproud wrote:
| I think the original down detectors do
| jl6 wrote:
| Mutually assured down-detection.
| MattSayar wrote:
| https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/downdetectorsdowndetector.c...
| pytlicek wrote:
| 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
| spiffyk wrote:
| Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 (2aEUR"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 } ] };
| }
| josteink wrote:
| 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 ;)
| josefresco wrote:
| 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.
| mhb wrote:
| 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".
| khasan222 wrote:
| Crying. I'm stealing this.
| oniony wrote:
| Presumably they're blind down detectors.
| mobilene wrote:
| It's stuff like this that makes me still love the Internet.
| debo_ wrote:
| Things might soon get bad enough that we will start calling them
| "up detectors."
| dapoyo wrote:
| 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!
| calebm wrote:
| To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
| zoidb wrote:
| there is also https://isdowndetectordown.com/
| moi2388 wrote:
| How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?
| waffletower wrote:
| 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.
| _nickwhite wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha
| isaachinman wrote:
| No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a
| fantastic team.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)
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