Hacker News Reader

Downdetector in incidents like this is 100% misinformation.

Why

Downdetector does not actually monitor the services. It aggregates user reports from socials etc. For large-scale incidents, the reports get really noisy and it will show that basically everything is down.

I thought that was the whole premise of Downdetector, no? User reports, because first-party status updates are tightly controlled by those first parties?

Was not basically everything (hyperbolically speaking, of course) practically impacted today?

How much weight really comes from those social media posts? Is there an indirect effect of people reading these posts, then flocking to hit the report button, sight unseen?

Who watches the watchmen?

(downdetector infra also likely affected)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com