DownDetector gives you a graph of the number of people who googled "is XYZ service down" and clicked on a DownDetector link. It's a useful metric, but it also has error, because sometimes users blame the wrong service.
In this case, both AWS and Cloudflare had high-profile outages within the past few months. So a bunch of people tried to check their Twitter, got an error, and said "huh, I wonder if AWS is down again". Or during yesterday's Verizon outage, DownDetector also showed spikes on AT&T and T-Mobile, presumably from people who forgot what cellular provider they had, were roaming, or maybe were trying to call someone on another network.
It also doesn't help that they normalize the scale of their graphs on the front page. If you click them, you can see that 75k people googled "is X down", while only 200 people googled "is AWS down".
I didn't realise that - thanks for the info. I actually found out just from a breaking news alert on the BBC which is unusual as I usually see tech news elsewhere first.
I think you forgot the /s tag (especially since it is an editorialization by the BBC, not the HN submitor). But yeah, the author probably has a motive for doing that.
Looking at DownDetector, I suspect a CloudFlare outage as there's some ominous climbing red lines for multiple services.
Currently it looks to me like X, Grok, CloudFlare and AWS are affected.
DownDetector gives you a graph of the number of people who googled "is XYZ service down" and clicked on a DownDetector link. It's a useful metric, but it also has error, because sometimes users blame the wrong service.
In this case, both AWS and Cloudflare had high-profile outages within the past few months. So a bunch of people tried to check their Twitter, got an error, and said "huh, I wonder if AWS is down again". Or during yesterday's Verizon outage, DownDetector also showed spikes on AT&T and T-Mobile, presumably from people who forgot what cellular provider they had, were roaming, or maybe were trying to call someone on another network.
It also doesn't help that they normalize the scale of their graphs on the front page. If you click them, you can see that 75k people googled "is X down", while only 200 people googled "is AWS down".
I didn't realise that - thanks for the info. I actually found out just from a breaking news alert on the BBC which is unusual as I usually see tech news elsewhere first.
Can we prepend the owner of every company moving forward?
I think you forgot the /s tag (especially since it is an editorialization by the BBC, not the HN submitor). But yeah, the author probably has a motive for doing that.
That would be good for companies that replaced a well known brand name with a single letter.