A down detector for down detector's down detector
34 comments
·November 19, 2025ndr42
standarditem
It's down detectors all the way down
daanavitch
Unfortunately this website relies on Tailwind's CDN for styling, which in turn is deployed on Vercel, which in turn is mostly hosted on AWS.
5d41402abc4b
The page is 320KB in size. They could have made it a static page with some simple HTML, the whole thing would have been under 10KB and would not have needed a CDN.
pcdevils
Probably churned out using v0 which defaults to bloat
xg15
Wasn't there some tech demo some time ago how to store a tiny webpage in DNS TXT records? I think this would be the usecase for that :)
rectang
The bottom turtle should be a raspberry pi in somebody’s closet. No dependencies.
FeepingCreature
Bad news about ISPs... Really you want a RPi on solar power, attached to a longwave transmitter, and with direct peering agreements with all dominant global providers. Most well-connected rpi in existence.
NitpickLawyer
Add that moon-bouncing thing that got popular last week. For redundancy.
ricardo81
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked
LeoPanthera
This is beginning to be a good sign that it was AI generated. For some reason the AI's really love using Tailwind CSS.
SeanAnderson
I'm not affiliated with this genius. I was just snooping around the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012), took a chance at modifying the site's URL, and found myself pleasantly surprised.
spirographer
It would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.
rozenmd
And a page monitoring this one: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=o398t...
This one looks like it's behind a CDN, at least
keepamovin
Just thinking about it, wouldn't a distributed P2P "mesh" be a better fit for reliability probing? We could share results, see where it was inaccessible from. It's kind of an oxymoron to have a centralized down detector lol
Cthulhu_
Sure, a p2p network of people doing distributed pings on a wide range of services sounds like a good idea. Of course, you'd need people willing to run it. A small incentive might be needed... or just a default of "if you want to use this software, you agree to also have your client ping other websites to check if they're up from your location".
But it's not a new idea apparently, a quick search led to https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1lv9flt/built_a... / https://synthmon.io/home,
imiric
Or—hear me out—we actually build services that leverage the native distributed infrastructure of the internet, so that we don't need down detectors. What a concept.
raverbashing
The ultimate down detector should have a fixed IP address as well, in the case of other stuff failing as well
sam-cop-vimes
I'm almost wishing for the next major outage just so I can see this working :-)
fedeb95
who detects the down detectors's down detector's downs?
rocauc
yes, downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector is available.
sixtyj
Is there a length limit for domain names? :)
Cthulhu_
Yes, according to RFC 1035 section 2.3.4 [0], it's 255 octets. Long answer written by a human: https://superuser.com/a/1843870
AceJohnny2
i've reached semantic satiation
jb1991
Hm, looks like this site is down.
The title reminds me of the 5th installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:
"Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."
The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.