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Comment by jonas-w | Hacker News Reader

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jonas-w

Everytime something has degraded performance or is down for me:

1. check my internet connection

2. check HN

3. check official statuspage

View on HN

Step #3 is unfortunately often pointless given that often either:

1. the status page is unavailable too

2. the status page reports the service as green/available even though it's red/down (maybe it's still accessible to the service pinging its health status, maybe it's "accessible" but not actually functional, maybe the engineers were too busy fixing the problem to click the button to update the status page, maybe not updating the status lets them pretend they're within SLAs or KPIs)

I suppose a static html page saying everything is fine hosted on the same infrastructure as your service would be an accurate indicator a good chunk of the time.

Yeah it gives you a bit of confidence that the problem may not be something on your end. I don't think there's a perfect way to handle this, though.

Most places don't have an automated status page because of the issues with automation showing outages when they don't exist. Someone manually goes and clicks something on the status page.

This doesn't seem like a good reason. I can't imagine anyone checks githubstatus.com before accessing github.com. People check it after they have issues.

I assume it's more due to contracts, marketing, and denying responsibility.

HN is de facto the fastest secondary source for any current event related to tech.

I also use it for connectivity check. Most other sites have so much ads and cookies it creates long lags with adblock in some older systems I use. So I point to HN and get a really fast response that the web is working

One time HN was itself down and that was a confusing experience

I check HN first because that also checks my internet connection :-)

that said, HN is also down a lot lately, but that the kind of outage that makes more more productive actually!

Surely you can skip the first step, as the second combines them.

And if HN is down, you know it's a biggie

> check my internet connection

How do you do that?

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