Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

So many sites down... and unfortunately not one of them is Twitter

Amazing that down detector manages to stay up during these kinds of outages. Noticed it has been a little slow but they really have done a good job keeping it up even though large portions of the internet is down right now.

Who detects if Down Detector is down? Is there a isdowndetectordown.com site?

It's parked by GoDaddy, but unfortunately their website is fubar by this outage if you try to click through to see how much they want for it :)

I guess the mother of all Network Downtime checker is HN.

"I dunno. Coast Guard?"

Sounds like when Fuckedcompany put itself on Fuckedcompany.

It's interesting that they report an AWS outage but there don't seem to be any issues there. Looks like their methodology is a bit too reliant on those speculative tweets from the first 5 minutes of all these sites going down. https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

> So many websites are down, are AWS servers down or something?

> Amazon web services is down which is affecting a lot of company web sites and services. Not sure what is going on.

> Miss us? @aldotcom and a whole bunch of other folks have been knocked off the internet by what appears to be an AWS attack/system failure. We'll be back. ?

It’s just based on user reports, so this is people mischaracterizing it as an AWS outage.

Yep that's my point. I'm guessing that for a lot of sites they can verify if there's an outage pretty easily when they see a spike in reports, but for something like AWS unless they updated their status page (lol) or downdetector ran a bunch of stuff on there just to check with, I guess they don't have a good way to verify it.

Gotcha, yeah I guess I always just considered that out of scope for their service and that it’s just a report aggregator but I suppose you would expect it to be at least a little bit clever based on the “detector” name

cloudfront was down too

You got your wish, looks like Twitter's on the list now too.

Is there a way to tell your system to fall back to the last known IP address if DNS server isn't reachable?

Basically soft-invalidate your local DNS cache but it back from the cache graveyard if DNS is down.

It should be possible to set your cache so it lives forever but still checks for a new IP at normal expiring time.

Unbound has a 'serve-expired' option: https://nlnetlabs.nl/documentation/unbound/unbound.conf/#ser...

You could run a local resolver like dnsmasq or Unbound that can “serve stale” on upstream failures, but that assumes the DNS failure is a client-facing resolver one.

From what I observed here, it was more internal DNS related: Newegg was serving an opaque “DNS failure” error page from Akamai’s front-end which is likely because their infra was failing to resolve names internally.

> Unfortunately not one of them is Twitter

Please keep comments like this off HN

Reply on news.ycombinator.com