“There’s always a bit of joking giddiness internally. “We have fallen in love with outages,” Suttles says. The summer of 2019 was a particularly eventful one because of an outage of Google’s core services in June and another Facebook outage in July bringing in millions of reports. Read: When the entire internet seems to break at onceĭuring big outages, even Suttles scrambles to the site to watch users solving their own problems. It has become the internet’s panic room, suffused with snow-day energy.
The technology is not so sophisticated-the outages are determined almost exclusively by user reports-so Downdetector stands out as the internet-outage website mostly because Downdetector has already been, in so many people’s brains, the internet-outage website. On the most basic level, the site is an SEO play, its CEO, Doug Suttles, admits. If, as with Facebook’s News Feed this morning, something is starting to go wrong for a greater number of people, the graph will spike and turn red. It’s the first search result for questions such as “ Is Twitter down?” and “ Is Facebook down?” and “ Is Gmail down?” and “ Is the whole internet out in New York City?” On any given day, if everything is working fine, a graph showing just tiny smatterings of failure reports will be painted a soothing aquamarine. There is only one place to take all this pain and nervous energy: Downdetector, a simple, boring website founded in 2001 to report outages of all kinds of internet services. We hover over our keyboards, moving our hands in ways that don’t make sense, like former nicotine addicts who continue to hold pens as if they are cigarettes. When the instant-chat apps of American offices sputter and crash, we go to Twitter and say, “We promise we are still working!” We feel lost, bereft, confused, fidgety, as we are forced to make typing noises with our mouths (“talking”).
When Instagram is down, no one can see what we see.
When Twitter crashes, how do we tweet about it? We try and try. It can happen at any moment, yet we’re never prepared.
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