Down Detector doesn't really detect anything other than people saying "Is [service X] down?" on Twitter, which does mean that Xbox Live appears to be permanently offline if you believe them because the typical user for Xbox Live will declare anything from tripping over their ethernet cable to a tornado levelling their house preventing a connection to mean Xbox Live is down.

It’s still useful if you remove units from the graph and treat it as a sparkline. If there are reliably ~100 Xbox Live complaints on Twitter per hour, then suddenly there are 3000, that’s an outage.

If that were true, the line should be flat-ish, but it and playstation's show the same extreme spike at the same time as aws etc.

lol imagine if azure was just AWS in the backend

Is it bad that I can almost see that being a quick and dirty MVP to get out the door while you built your own cloud solution? Raises serious migration and cost issues, but... would be interesting.

I think for some targeted things there might well be "value added" services you could offer to transparently wrap AWS. E.g. a "write-through" S3 wrapper was something I was actually looking at because some clients when I was contracting were very reluctant to trust anything but AWS for durability but at the same time AWS bandwidth costs were so extortionate that renting our own servers from somewhere like Hetzner and then proxying writes both to a local disk and to S3 and serve up from local disk with a fallback to pull a fresh copy from S3 if missing broke even at a quite small number of terabytes transferred each month.

The nice part about something like that is that properly wrapped you can change your durable storage as needed, and can easily even selectively pick "cheaper but less trusted" options for less critical data. It also allows you to leverage AWS features to ride closer to the wire. E.g. to take another example than storage, I've used this to cut the cost of managed hosting by being to spill over onto EC2 instances in the past, allowing you to run at much higher utilisation rate than what you can safely on managed / colo / on-prem servers alone - as a result, ironically the ability to spill over onto EC2 makes EC2 far less competitive in terms of cost to actually run stuff on most of the time.

> a quick and dirty MVP to get out the door while you built your own cloud solution?

Seemed to work for Dropbox.

For the core services? Definitely. But do we really know that some 3rd party API which doesn't fail gracefully isn't causing this?