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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.

1 day agoby spyridonas

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

1 day agoby jesperwe

This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.

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

1 day 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".

1 day agoby mhb

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

It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.

1 day agoby 4ndrewl

Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.

1 day 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...

1 day 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.

1 day agoby _nickwhite

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

3 hours agoby everdev

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...

1 day agoby Retr0id

1 day agoby jakub_g

1 day agoby pytlicek

Is it hosted on Cloudflare?

1 day agoby ricq

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

1 day agoby mrbluecoat

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.

1 day agoby iopjgalejandro

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

1 day agoby SeanAnderson

and i still can't find any feathers

1 day 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.

1 day agoby josefresco

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.

1 day agoby waffletower

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

1 day agoby mobilene

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!

1 day agoby dapoyo

there is also https://isdowndetectordown.com/

1 day 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.

1 day agoby tonymet

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

1 day agoby ulf-77723

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

1 day agoby isaachinman

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

1 day agoby debo_

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

1 day agoby andreygrehov

isisitdowndown.com is still free

1 day agoby theturtlemoves

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

1 day agoby calebm

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.

1 day agoby alentred

quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?

1 day agoby p_v_doom

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

1 day agoby jojobas

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

1 day agoby makach

How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?

1 day agoby moi2388

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 ;)

1 day agoby josteink