Is it down for everyone or just me? | Hacker News Reader

Is it down for everyone or just me?

downforeveryoneorjustme.com

88 pointsdedalus45 comments

A Quick Way To See If a website is down for Everyone or Just You written by Twitter developer Alex Payne

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/q?domain=downforeveryoneo...

They special cased their own domain. I love attention to detail like that.

Another good one: http://lolinator.com/lol/lolinator.com/

Mmm, indeed. I have a bit of a fetish for good design, and some times what is really called for is the right "if/then/else" construct.

It's really unfortunate sometimes that "general cases > special cases" fundamentalism is so rampant these days, . . .

I think it's a great example of noticing a common problem that no one has solved (to my knowledge) and providing a solution that's damned obvious in retrospect. The domain might be too long to remember. Maybe something like downorjustme.com (available) would be better.

Oddly though, it says youtube.com is down (maybe that's your test case?).

Their host must be in China

Their host is in France (gandi.net), and it's a project by Alex (http://al3x.net) who works on Twitter.

kind of a joke, but good to know some background. thnx

They should make a little widget that others can load on their servers to help in the effort:

Down from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx in France,

Up from yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy in New Zealand

Etc

This seems to be popular? Why? How often would this be useful and save time?

In what situations would a website be down for just you? Couldn't you just curl, ping, or traceroute a website instead?

Not if you don't know what those things are.

I saw this the other day and thought it was pretty neat.

I'm a little unclear how it works. Does it actually attempt to load a page from the requested site or does it simply log the number of people asking about it and assume that something is down by the volume of requests?

If the 2nd one, I can see how it could be pretty flawed, easily gamed, and only usable with some serious critical mass. (It could also explain the YouTube thing if lots of people are using that to check it out).

I assumed it just requested the '/' with an HTTP request...

when i do it to my server i get two "HEAD /" http requests from their ip.

This could be why it shows youtube as down:

curl -I -A "" www.youtube.com

curl -I -A "" www.google.com

I suggest to whoever made that site to put a user agent string in the request.

Request details: Remote: xvm-189-204.ghst.net (217.70.189.204) Request: HTTP/1.1 HEAD UA: downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Also sets the HTTP_ACCEPT header to /.

No referer or any other header.

Pierre

Suggestion: instead of saying "Check another site?" on the result page, just add an input box to test another page.

Clever and simple. A nice combination.

yeah, a cool little app

yeah, agreed.

I wrote a 'similar' thing called l8tr (http://l8tr.org) that mails you when a down web site comes back.

There's also plenty of real estate for banner ads on the main page! That will make it easier to monetize the service.

It's some sites like these that make me wonder,"Why didn't I think of that?"

Plus, it would save me some time answering questions in various IRC channels.

http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.c...

Seems to be working.

By the way, who exactly upmodded this?

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com

youtube is down is it? :/

Good idea, but an error like that doesn't fill me with confidence ;)

I heard about this site here yesterday, and already had a chance to use it today to test out if a newly registered domain worked elsewhere.

I like these simple one-question-one-answer sites, though I never remember about them when I actually need a specific one. This one is the first Google hit for "down for everyone" though, so that should take care of the long domain name.

I wonder if it only pings from one location? (it probably doesn't account for "down for some people" dns problems).

the latest meme is to call them "single serving websites"

They're awesome http://www.kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites

"...though I never remember about them when I actually need a specific one."

Could be a good use case for bookmarks.... ;-)

not until bookmarks are easy to search through. which their might be a plugin for but that's not easy enough.

www.google.com/bookmarks

Cool app. My first try resulted in this

"It's not just you! digg.com looks down from here."

But I don't think its really down. At least not from here :).

Can somebody make a script for Firefox that automatically queries this site when the browser is unable to resolve a URL and then returns a dialog letting the user know if the site is truly down? That would be epic.

Its buggy. Too aggressive timeout perhaps? http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bsnl.co.in

Wikipedia.org is down presently, and it is nice to know it is down for everyone and not just me. I hope they come back up soon, as I feel crippled by its absence.

Good idea. Can find a different domain name? It is long.

Ironically, it seems to be down, at least for me, right now! I got one query done, but nothing after that. -- Edit: Ok, works again.

This is neat. I'd like to see it extended to things other than websites, like MSN messenger. Not sure how that would work though.

It incorrectly reports my site (mirwin dot net) as down, but adding (www.) makes it report as up. Kind of odd.

Heh, I actually just used it...

It's not just you! wikipedia.org looks down from here.

How exactly does it work though ? Specifically how big is the "everyone" sample ?

Second question: 1.

hehe, is this a play off of "istwitterdown.com"

Lovely idea.

very good and simple idea.

the text field is a little too hard to notice in safari given the pre-entered text. i suggest adding a thicker border and using javascript to select it on pageload.

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