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Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
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!!
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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.
Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between).
Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go wrong.
A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
There is this weird thing that happens with hyperscale - the combination of highly central decision-making, extreme interconnection / interdependence of parts, and the attractiveness of lots of money all conspire to create a system pulled by unstable attractors to a fracturing point (slowed / mitigated at least a little by the inertia of such a large ship).
Are smaller scale services more reliable? I think that's too simple a question to be relevant. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we know one thing for sure - when smaller services go down the impact radius is contained. When a corrupt MBA who wants to pump short term metrics for a bonus gains power, the damage they can do is similarly contained. All risk factors are boxed in like this. With a hyperscale business, things are capable of going much more wrong for many more people, and the recursive nature of vertical+horizontal integration causes a calamity engine that can be hard to correct.
Take the financial sector in 08. Huge monoliths that had integrated every kind of financial service with every other kind of financial service. Few points of failure, every failure mode exposed to every other failure mode.
There's a reason asymmetric warfare is hard for both parties - cellular networks of small units that can act independently are extremely fault tolerant and robust against changing conditions. Giants, when they fall, do so in spectacular fashion.
Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug?
If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions.
But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on an API that runs on their cloud!
> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature
It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away).
The real problem is not having a fail-over provider. Modern software is so abstracted (tens, hundreds, even thousands of layers), and yet we still make the mistake of depending on one, two layers to make things "go".
When your one small provider goes down, no problem, switch over to your other provider. Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...
Very few online services are so essential that they require a fail-over plan for an AWS outage, so this is just plain over-engineering.
> Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...
Let's not stroke our egos too much here, mkay?
That just leads to an upstream single point of failure.
Depends on your customers understanding that. We had a gym with 'smart' pilates machines that went down. Hard to explain to them the cloud is involved
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.
Hard disagree. A smaller provider will think twice about whether they use a Tier 1 data center versus a Tier IV data center because the cost difference is substantial and in many cases prohibitively expensive.
This. There's a fundamental logic error here. You simply don't hear about downtimes at smaller providers that often because it doesn't affect a significant portion of the internet like it does e.g. for AWS. But that doesn't mean they are more stable in general.
yeah, I'd like to see hard data on uptimes / reliability between these 2 services before declaring that big = bad and small = good.
FlyIO (and Digital Ocean) had horrible up-time when they first got started. In the last 6-12 months, FlyIO been much better. But they would go down all the time or have unexpected CI bugs/changes.
Digital Ocean accidentally hard deleted user's object stores before their IPO.
> A lot of people want the brand recognition too.
Not to mention the familiarity of the company, its services and expectations. You can hire people with experience with AWS, Azure or GCP, but the more niche you go, the higher the possibility that some people you hire might not know how to work with those systems and their nuances, which is fine they can learn as they work, but that adds to ramp up time and could lead to inadvertent mistakes happening.
This could also be an anti-pattern for hiring - getting people with Amazing Web Service (tm) certification and missing out on candidates with a solid understanding of the foundational principles these services are built on
I agree, though the industry does this all the time by hiring someone with a degree vs someone who built key infrastructure and has no degree, solely because they have a degree. Remember, the creator of brew couldn't get past a Google interview because they asked him to hand craft some algorithm, I probably would have not done well with those either. Does that make him or me worse developers? Doubtful. Does it mean Google missed out on hiring someone who loves his craft? Yes.
I think that is often the perception, but is usually mistaken.
Smaller providers tend to have simpler systems so it only adds to ramp up time if you hire someone who only knows AWS or whatever. Simpler also means fewer mistakes.
If you stick to a simple set of services (e.g. VPS or containers + object storage) there are very few service specific nuances.
They also have the risk factor of leaving the market entirely as well, and you having to scramble to pick up the pieces.
I've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.
First I used an ex101 with an i9-13900. Within a week it just froze. It could not be reset remotely. Nothing in kern.log. Support offered no solution but a hard reboot. No mention of what might be wrong other than user error.
A few months later, one of the drives just disconnects from raid by itself. It took support 1 hour to respond and they said they found no issue so it must be my fault.
Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.
It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...
I think cloudflare has billions worth of incentives to be reliable however they can slip up, it happens and that's why centralization is bad.
That is true.
However, I would say that the effect of this outage on customer retention will be (relatively) smaller than it would be for a smaller CDN.
Maybe? Maybe not? It depends on the nature of the outage and how motivated their customers are to switch over to a new service.
The good news is that we're just living in a perfect natural experiment:
Cloudflare just caused a massive internet outage costing millions of dollars worldwide, in part due to a very sloppy mistake that definitely ought to have been prevented (using Rust's “unwrap” in production ). Let's see how many customers they lose because of that and we'll see how big are their incentives. (If you look at the evolution of their share value, it doesn't look like the incident terrified their shareholders at least…)
That experiment already happened last year with Crowdstrike. Nothing detrimental happened. Their revenue actually increased and stock went up
Stock went up because if they can cause a lot of damage without repercussions they must be very valuable.
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
That's an incredibly bad take lol.
There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.
I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.
> I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
I don't think they'd care. Companies only care about one thing: stock price. Everything rolls up into that. If AWS got hacked and said company was affected by it, it wouldn't be a big deal because they'd be one of many and they'd be lost in the crowd. Any hit to their stock/profits would be minimal and easily forgotten about.
Now, if they were on prem or hosted with Bob's Cloud and got hacked? Different story altogether.
> Companies only care about one thing: stock price.
Its rarely affected in any case. Take a look at the Crowdstrike price chart (or revenue or profits). I think most people (including investors) just take it for granted that systems are unreliable and regard it as something you live with.
I think that's more of a indicator that it hasn't effected their business. They lost nearly 1/5 of their stock price after that incident (obviously not accounting for other factors; I'm not a stock analyst). Investors thought they'd lose customers and reacted in obvious fashion.
But it's since been restored. According to the news, they lost very little customers over the incident. That is why their stock came back. If they continued having problems, I doubt it would have been so rosy. So yes, to your point, a blip here or there happens.
Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.
>Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.
A large number of cloud customers dont need the complexity that the cloud can offer. Like, yes, its hard to 1:1 feature replicate the cloud. But so many people just have some VMs and some routes.
And they would need a team to support the hypervisor. Znd its backup. And its performance. And, and, and.
This is fine if you are big. Anything smaller and it is a big problem.
This is also why they do not manage their plumbing and do not run z restaurant in house. Some things are better left to companies that do it at scale
> Less complexity to go wrong.
This sounds like a good thing.
It is, in itself.
It does mean that you get fewer services, you have to do more sysadmin internally or use other providers for those which a lot of people are very reluctant to do.
I bet most people don't even need the extra features.
When forced to use AWS I only use the extra features I am specifically told to or that are already in use in order to make the system less tied to AWS and easier for me to manage (I am not an AWS specialist so its easier for me to just run stuff like I would on any server or VPS). I particularly dislike RDS (of things I have used). I like Lightsail because its reasonably priced and very like just getting a VPS.
S3 is something of an exception, but it does not tie you down (everyone provides block storage now, and you can use S3 even if everything else is somewhere else) for me if storing lots of large files that are not accessed very much (so egress fees are low).
Looking forward to the Show HN: I built a web site that uses all of AWS services.
That would be an expensive Show HN.
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.
I disagree because conversely, outages for larger providers cause millions or maybe even billions of dollars in losses for its customers. They might be more "stuck" in their current providers' proprietary schemes, but these kinds of losses will cause them to move away, or at least diversify cloud providers. In turn, this will cause income losses to the cloud provider.
And they sell when get big but can't afford to be.
AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.
You can use whatever infrastructure you want for whatever reason, but you may not have an accurate picture of the availability.
> AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.
This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year.
That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.
My clients (extremely large) AWS based infrastructure experienced no downtime this year. So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.
I don't use cloud flare for anything, so no comment there.
> So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.
Valid. I should have made it clear that I meant "clearly better from GP's perspective."
Clearly better than what though?
>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year
That's the least useful information.
What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.
Earlier this year, a Hetzner server I manage was shutdown, and after I started it via the console, it booted to a rescue system. In the same month, it was rebooted without a reason. There was some maintenance notice but the server was not listed as impacted.
Note that I'm not saying Hetzner is bad. Just incidents happen in Europe too. The server didn't have a lot of issues like this over the years.
Big fan of bunny.net as CDN, however Cloudflare is my "smart" filter for all kind of attacks, AI scrapers, malicious traffic, etc.
Am I missing something or is bunny.net not actually a replacement for that?
They've recently introduced bunny.net Shield to add a security layer. I've not made use of it yet so I don't know what the coverage is like or how effective it is: https://bunny.net/shield/
This is very interesting. Thank you for making me aware!
That component is what keeps me from using Cloudflare for anything. Not because it exists, but because the way it's run is terrible for the open web: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
How does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
As an American solo developer, I am close to doing the same. These mega-corps are out of control.
Out of control in what way?
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
-1 for Scaleway, they were a really good deal years ago but have become expensive af
well they're not comparable to hetzner anymore, both in terms of features and price. only their dedibox brand could compare, as it's the classic hosting approach vs cloud.
for the hobby crowd it's a shame, for a corporation it's still cheaper than aws with the extra bonus of not having any tie to the us.
We are also looking to migrate off Cloudflare. I thought Bunny.net was mostly a pure CDN, not a reverse proxy like Cloudflare. Am I wrong? One of the most important things for us would be DDoS protection.
American solo developer here. Moved to Hetzner two months ago. They have servers in Oregon for west coast people. My storage box is in Germany but that is okay, it is for backups.
Do you have anything for device management? Like managing local admin accounts on Linux, Macintosh and Windows? I'm afraid we'll have to use InTune.
Aren't costs higher though?
Are you using a US-based transactional email service like Twilio? Curious about EU-based alternatives.
Hello, You can test Sweego - https://www.sweego.io/ We (I'm the CTO) are fully European Bye Pierre-Yves
nice, im looking to ditch SES, one of the last services i have running on AWS
Hyvor Relay (https://github.com/hyvor/relay) can be self-hosted. We are planning a cloud version for 2026. (I am a co-founder)
Interesting, I've added it on my Awesome Opensource Email Resources https://github.com/Mindbaz/awesome-opensource-email
https://mailpace.com is fully European based and independent
They are based in the UK. That is technically Europe, but I believe for privacy regulations it isn't the same as a EU-country, but I could be very wrong. Would love to be educated on this by someone.
UK inherited the same gdpr from the EU, so practically it remains the same.
MailPace data is also hosted in the EU only
There are self hostable alts to twillio
Same here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so many sites were down.
I feel like a year is too short a time frame to measure reliability.
This is worth its own post.
Wow looks like you don't have one of the most renowned benefits of capitalism: over-reliance on corporatist infrastructure.
> Bunny.net
Ah yes, the place for RabbitMQ endpoints.
Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1
I remember when the CDN I was working for had to change our status page provider when our first one became our client.
This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.
but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector
You're on that site right now!
HN is the true down detector - if HN is down TCP is down.
https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/downdetectorsdowndetector.c...
I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.
haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.
> Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
Arbites.
"To serve the Emperor. To protect His domains. To judge and stand guard over His subjects. To carry the Emperor's law to all worlds under His blessed protection. To pursue and punish those who trespassed against His word."
i love you guys.
Can down detector not detect whether down detector detector is down or not?
Maybe distributed down detection?
I know there are people here perfectly capable of running with that idea and we might just see a distributed down detector announced on HN :)
http://factoryfactoryfactory.net/
See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1 so they all go down together anyway
pervs.
Time for the META Down Detector - detecting which of the three is down
Or "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
I think the original down detectors do
Mutually assured down-detection.
It's detectors all the way down.
There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.
https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo
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".
Presumably they're blind down detectors.
Crying. I’m stealing this.
But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.
It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....
who is going to throw $10 at
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...
Had to check, but that is actually beyond what DNS allows. Labels (the part between dots) are limited to 63 characters. We could sneakily drop an s somewhere in there and then it would fit.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035
Also I think I triggered a nice error log in domaintools just now. https://whois.domaintools.com/downdetectorsdowndetectorsdown...
Have to use more efficient notation - downdetectorsx5.com
fix.downdetectors.com
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I keep coming back to check. :-)
Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?
It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(
It says down now correctly :D
4xDowndetector lol
The Internet is back!
It was worth the laugh, thanks!
Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.
From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph
Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.
It's a centralization vs decentralisation vs distributed system question.
Since down detectors serve to detect failures of centralized (and decentralized systems) the idea would be to at least get that right: a distributed system to detect outages.
You basically run detectors that heartbeat each others. Just a few suffice.
Once you start to see clusters of detectors go silent, you can assume things are falling apart, which is fine so long as a few remain.
Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.
It's down detectors all the way down
here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...
Looks like it's hosted in London?
We could create a linked list of these and just refer to the N’th one as N-down detector.
Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.
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...
Do you need a CDN for a static html, no images? I would guess no, even if you.are being bombarded with requests
I would guess yes, unless you have a server with unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity to every other AS...
But CDNs are made for static content so your comment means I can't run a dynamic website unless I have unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity.
"Need" is a strong word. But I think the point is that if you expect wildly spikey traffic/don't want the site to go down if it receives a very sudden influx of requests, going static is a very good answer, much cheaper than "serverless" or over-provisioning.
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.
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...
It just fakes it as far as I can tell.
script.js calls `fetchStatus()`, which calls `generateMockStatus()` to get the statuses, which just makes up random response times:
Semi-related: Datadog recently created https://updog.ai
I'm curious if this site actually uses AI in some form or if it's just the hot TLD at the moment. There's no mention of AI on the page itself.
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew
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
Is it hosted on Cloudflare?
I feel like the classic East Dakota reply would be that cloud flare CDN does not host your data and merely proxies it (bonus points if he uses the words "mere conduit" in his reply and therefore cloud flare can't be held responsible yada yada).
Jokes aside, as far as I can tell, https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare CDN/Proxy
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare SSL
However, selesti reports it uses cloudflare DNS?
https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=https://downdetect...
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is using Cloudflare DNS!
Checked 8 global locations, found DNS entries for Cloudflare in 3
Found in: England, Russia, USA
Not found in: China, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Netherlands
That won’t be an issue though - as we all know, DNS is rarely related to cloud failures
of course, adding to the joke
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670
Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.
What are you, an LLM? You point the first one at the second one and create a loop instead of an infinite "one more" chain
I wish.
and i still can't find any feathers
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.
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.
Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for good measure.
https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector :)
It's stuff like this that makes me still love the Internet.
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.
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 ;)
Damn, I'll have to build a local down detector for your down detector now.
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!
there is also https://isdowndetectordown.com/
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
Use the original down detector to monitor the down detector for down detector for down detector. Complete the circle!
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.
No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.
Things might soon get bad enough that we will start calling them "up detectors."
isisitdowndown.com is still free
Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
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.
How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?
quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?
I know this is a shitpost but someone has to say it:
Yo dawg I hear you like downdetector so...
Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D
But who is going to watch him?!
his cat. at least when he's on toilet
Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”
absolute fucking legend
[dead]
Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s