I can guarantee you with 100% confidence from experience that the call centers for AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, etc. are all blowing up right now because of users who assume that if the Instagram app isn’t loading it means the “wifi” is broken. Also keep in mind “wifi” doesn’t mean 802.11, it means “anything related to the internet” up to and including 4g/5g and Ethernet.

Heh, as soon as I saw Instagram failing to load, I immediately assumed it was Roger’s fault. They just suck when it comes to reliability and Instagram has a much better track record.

Opened devconsole, saw it was a server error then went to HN for confirmation.

Ok great. How does that equate to having down detector filter reports?

The important step is to filter downdetector from your consciousness. It only exists as rage/cable news bait and nothing more. It is not a useful tool, it’s just a clever way to serve AdWords iFrames.

Yes, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?

Absolutely without a doubt.

99.9% of people don’t know what single sign on means or how it works.

Sometimes I wonder what world HN lives in.

A world where people on HN are statistically extremely likely to be at least in the top 5% of the population in terms of skill at using a computer.

See also https://xkcd.com/2501/

> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?

Have you never seen The Website Is Down? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE

The answer is: way more people than a software developer might think. Ask anyone in IT, or go to anywhere bugs are reported and read a handful.

yeah that’s my point. No one who arranges icons by penis is taking time to go file a report on down detector.

Ahh, I see. In that case, most of DownDetectors data are from Twitter and other sources, not first party reporting, although even in the case of first party data, it is also sourced via "visits to DownDetector" which can be from a simple Google search for "is Instagram down?"

If DownDetector relied primarily on direct reporting, they'd be the last to know.

> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector?

Yes, absolutely. 100%.

> Even if there were doesn’t the outage graph give you exactly the information your asking be curated?

https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

Was there an AWS outage this morning? The graph sure looks like it, but there wasn't.

We get calls at work when people can't reach our services while their power is out, so yes, I do.