I made a down detector for down detector

412 points129 comments17 hours ago
spyridonas

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.

show comments
waffletower

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.

mhb

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".

show comments
mylons

This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.

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

show comments
jesperwe

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

4ndrewl

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

It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.

show comments
BrenBarn

Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.

ZeroConcerns

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...

show comments
pytlicek

I have similar project like this: https://hostbeat.info/ More like t uptime robot and sure, I was really surprised yesterday how many alerts I have got and how many notifications were sent yesterday for this system users. Good work anyway

Retr0id

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...

moi2388

How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?

josefresco

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.

mobilene

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

dapoyo

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!

calebm

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

jakub_g

Semi-related: Datadog recently created https://updog.ai

show comments
debo_

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

ricq

Is it hosted on Cloudflare?

show comments
goopypoop

and i still can't find any feathers

ulf-77723

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

show comments
theturtlemoves

isisitdowndown.com is still free

alentred

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.

jojobas

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

p_v_doom

quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?

makach

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

show comments
josteink

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 ;)

spiffyk

Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me

cweagans

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

show comments
Brajeshwar

“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”

gblargg

Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s