> It's almost never actually an outage impacting all of FAANG at once.
Exactly. If you click through down detector when things are _up_ you'll see people still complaining that $site is down. Could be a local power outage or even a flaky connection in their own home.
Down Detector is one of many signal sources and should have a "credibly" score associated with it that's proportional to the number of people complaining that something's down.
I can guarantee you with 100% confidence from experience that the call centers for AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, etc. are all blowing up right now because of users who assume that if the Instagram app isn’t loading it means the “wifi” is broken. Also keep in mind “wifi” doesn’t mean 802.11, it means “anything related to the internet” up to and including 4g/5g and Ethernet.
Heh, as soon as I saw Instagram failing to load, I immediately assumed it was Roger’s fault. They just suck when it comes to reliability and Instagram has a much better track record.
The important step is to filter downdetector from your consciousness. It only exists as rage/cable news bait and nothing more. It is not a useful tool, it’s just a clever way to serve AdWords iFrames.
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?
Absolutely without a doubt.
99.9% of people don’t know what single sign on means or how it works.
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?
Ahh, I see. In that case, most of DownDetectors data are from Twitter and other sources, not first party reporting, although even in the case of first party data, it is also sourced via "visits to DownDetector" which can be from a simple Google search for "is Instagram down?"
If DownDetector relied primarily on direct reporting, they'd be the last to know.
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?
Yes, absolutely. 100%.
> Even if there were doesn’t the outage graph give you exactly the information your asking be curated?
Exactly. If you click through down detector when things are _up_ you'll see people still complaining that $site is down. Could be a local power outage or even a flaky connection in their own home.
Down Detector is one of many signal sources and should have a "credibly" score associated with it that's proportional to the number of people complaining that something's down.