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Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

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After down detector went down with the rest of the internet during the Cloudflare outage today I decided to build a robust, independent tool which checks if down detector is down. Enjoy!!

As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year.

Cloudflare > Bunny.net

AWS > Hetzner

Business email > Infomaniak

Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.

2 months agoby spyridonas

Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1

2 months agoby jesperwe

This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.

but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector

2 months agoby mylons

Three down detectors walk into a bar. The bartender asks them if they're all up. The first says "I don't know". The second says "I don't know". The third says "Yes".

2 months agoby mhb

But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.

It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.

2 months agoby 4ndrewl

Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.

2 months agoby BrenBarn

Thank you for your service! Now, for an even bigger challenge: since it seems the increased demand for the Cloudflare status page brought down Amazon CloudFront for a bit as well, build a new CDN capable of handling that load as well...

2 months agoby ZeroConcerns

I think an important caveat here is that down detector was not actually down, the cloudflare human verification component was (AFAIK). I wonder if this downdetector down detector accounts for that aspect? It was technically "not down" but still unusable.

2 months agoby _nickwhite

How does it detect up-ness?

Downdetector was indeed down during the cf outage, but I think the index page was still returning 200 (although I didn't check).

Running a headless browser to take a screenshot to check would probably get you blocked by cf...

2 months agoby Retr0id

2 months agoby jakub_g

2 months agoby pytlicek

Is it hosted on Cloudflare?

2 months agoby ricq

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670

2 months agoby mrbluecoat

Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.

2 months agoby makach

and i still can't find any feathers

2 months agoby goopypoop

I randomly started vibe coding a website monitoring tool last week knowing full well about the mature competitors in this space and questioning myself along the way. Doesn't seem so crazy now.

2 months agoby josefresco

Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for good measure.

2 months agoby jojobas

It's stuff like this that makes me still love the Internet.

2 months agoby mobilene

This is the kind of recursive absurdity I come to HN for.

So, naturally, the feature request is: who watches the watchmen? We need downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com next.

2 months agoby iopjgalejandro

https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)

2 months agoby SeanAnderson

I made a picture of myself taking a picture of myself taking a picture of my self in a mirror... at some point I solved my halting problem and walked away.

2 months agoby waffletower

If my checks are correct, this site uses Cloudflare for DNS and AWS for hosting.

So if any of the things you want to know is down is down, chances are this site will be too ;)

2 months agoby josteink

I had this same idea when I got the "Unblock challenges.cloudflare.com" error while trying to access downdetector, lol!

It looks really nice, good job!

2 months agoby dapoyo

Nice! Who doesn’t like a good recursion? Fingers crossed that the down detector for down detector won’t be down, when down detector might be down

2 months agoby ulf-77723

there is also https://isdowndetectordown.com/

2 months agoby zoidb

the internet can be divided up into factions like Divergent. AWSubbies (orange), Azure-ants (blue), CloudFlaricons (black) & the Rogues (jester colors, like Google). A proper down detector would identify platform outages based on the number of faction members who are down.

2 months agoby tonymet

Damn, I'll have to build a local down detector for your down detector now.

2 months agoby everdev

Things might soon get bad enough that we will start calling them "up detectors."

2 months agoby debo_

No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.

2 months agoby isaachinman

isisitdowndown.com is still free

2 months agoby theturtlemoves

Niiice! Thank you for the laugh.

I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)

As the Web becomes more and more entangled, I don't know if there is any guarantee of what is really independent. We should make a diagram of this. Hopefully no cyclic dependencies there yet.

2 months agoby alentred

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

2 months agoby calebm

Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha

2 months agoby andreygrehov

How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?

2 months agoby moi2388

quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?

2 months agoby p_v_doom

Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D

2 months agoby cweagans

I know this is a shitpost but someone has to say it: