Yep that's my point. I'm guessing that for a lot of sites they can verify if there's an outage pretty easily when they see a spike in reports, but for something like AWS unless they updated their status page (lol) or downdetector ran a bunch of stuff on there just to check with, I guess they don't have a good way to verify it.

Gotcha, yeah I guess I always just considered that out of scope for their service and that it’s just a report aggregator but I suppose you would expect it to be at least a little bit clever based on the “detector” name

cloudfront was down too