Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravedave5 | Hacker News Reader

Since twitter went down the other week hackernews is now the primary 'is it down?' news site.

I don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings.

Post-mortems are interesting.

They're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.

See, we're over-reliant on HN for making these types of comments!

My favorite are the conspiracy theories as to why the outages are seemingly so close together in this Summer of 2019. All kinds of imaginative reasons abound.

My best guess is summer vacation :) it's at least true for my company who was one of the featured outages

My best guess is that "sequencing creates narratives." It's like in baseball, how a player who hits .333 over the season will have 0-10 and 10-10 stretches where he either can't hit everything or demolishes every pitch he sees. You'll often see sports news come up with stories for why this is happening, and most of the time it's just "this is how statistics work".

TL;dr- complex systems are complex, and trying to understand them isn't usually possible for outside parties.

Not entirely true regarding sports, 538 has done some decent analyses of basketball shooting and found that hot and cold shooting is often true, the same is likely true for baseball. Streaks are naturally occurring, both for randomness and due to other, harder to explain factors.

And yet it is the first place I checked to verify my experience

I suggest https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, slack its own self, or https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ or https://hosting.review/check-if-website-is-down/ or https://www.isitwp.com/uptime-checker/. No need to fill this site with three or four postings with non-substantial comments.

Sites like that just check if the URL is reachable. They don't have any way of testing for API issues.

Right. HN does neither.

It is appropriate if Slack being down affects software other than Slack. We can learn how to avoid outages in our own products happening due to 3rd party services such as Slack becoming unavailable.

I would love if threads like this became "how to make your Slackbots more resilient" or "high-availability messaging by archiving your Slack threads" or an actually interesting conversation topic. Instead of just complaining that Slack is popular and on-premise solutions never have technical problems, I'd love to hear some real solutions.

I've been fairly content with Matrix, the ecosystem has improved massively in the last couple months, reducing resource usage on the server I use and adding additional e2e encrypted clients besides Riot.

Bridges are also super handy for integrating with IRC, Slack and similar.

Agreed

I use https://downdetector.com/

I've often experienced issues with sites that say "everything's sunshine and rainbows" on their status pages, only to find that many other customers are experiencing the same problem.

Except that time when cloudflare took down even the downdetector.

People just copy what gets engagement.

ex. After an earthquake affecting a large population, you'll see stories about other irrelevant earthquakes leading you to believe a frequency is higher and then that kind of headline dissipates but nothing has changed at all

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