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Comment by reubano | Hacker News Reader

AWS is down too, this is likely the cause since Heroku runs on it. https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

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What is the proof that AWS is down? Functional monitoring of AWS by metrist.io (I'm a co-founder) shows no AWS problems. Downdetector is not a reliable source.

What makes Downdetector unreliable? It's showing a huge spike right now.

Their (metrist) claim is that DD is human reported and therefore unreliable.

Metrist monitors via bots

It can be useful, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. A perfect example is the recent Facebook (Meta) outage. When that happened, Downdetector showed that ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile all had issues. They didn't, it was just Facebook and users mentioned or otherwise claimed that it was their mobile carrier.

Downdetector relies on user reports, so e.g. if a user's ISP is down and they can't get to Facebook, they might report Facebook being down (or vice versa). DD spikes are typically indicative of _something_, but it's not always the actual down service.

Gotcha. Although for a spike this large (over 1000) for a tech service (AWS vs Facebook) I'd give some credence to it. It could be that everyone who reported AWS as down is running on Heroku. Definitely possible. For comparison Azure [0] and Google Cloud [1] have spikes under 30.

[0] https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/ [1] https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

It's solely based off social media and user reports. It's the "smoke" in the saying "where there's smoke, there's fire" with the caveat that in some cases there's actually no fire even if there's a decent amount of smoke.

Neat! Wish you had a clickable demo rather than just screenshots.

Thanks for the feedback, we can do that soon.

maybe your service isn't as reliable as you think it is ;)

AWS status page is all green.... Just kidding! I know the information content of the AWS status page is literally zero, it's always green!

Nah, it's just on a 12 hour delay between updates.

AWS must be only partially down, all of it is running fine for me in us-east-1. Elastic beanstalk ftw! :)

If us-east-1 is up I have a heard time believing ANYTHING aws is down

AWS status page is up, but going VERY slow, and says no issues.

As usual whenever there's an AWS outage

I still don't get why they use images

    <td class="bb pad04 top center" style="width: 32px">
      <img src="/images/status0.gif">
    </td>

Instead of unicode:https://www.htmlsymbols.xyz/unicode/U%2b2705

if the image tag is drawn dynamically then it is actually probably less bandwidth than the unicode character since the image can be cached at multiple locations including the browser.

.... no way.

Cache freshness checks involve a lot of headers, which take up way more bandwidth than one unicode character.

if you care about cache freshness - you could set the cache header to 10 years and it never be an issue again.

Less bandwidth than the 1-4 bytes of a codepoint in UTF-8? How do you figure?

Because if it is cached, then it is 0 bytes transferred. First request could be probably a few hundred bytes, but never needed again. And once it is at a CDN, there is never another request to the server.

It's because they can host the images in S3 buckets, so that their status page goes down when S3 is down.

But, this really happened in 2017.

No, AWS is not down.

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