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Comment by bcvvvy | Hacker News Reader

I bank with HSBC. Everything is up and working.

A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.

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It's a pretty good source ime (at least, massive spikes tend to correlate well with issues). Traditional organisations aren't as transparent as SF tech companies about service downtime. Plus, if the service isn't working for its users, I wouldn't say it's actually up.

Exactly. "Responding to pings" is not the same as "letting me get work done".

If I had a nickel for every solid-green status page I shook my fist at while the actual site faceplanted on every request...

I've found that it's better than most service status pages -- Downdetector shows when users are reporting problems, while most service status pages only post significant confirmed outages, but there can still be service affecting issues that don't show up on the status page yet (or ever)

It's a really bad source compared to what? Downdetector is not perfect, but is usually correct when I check it. Official status pages on the other hand are usually wrong when I check them.

“Correct” here presumably means “some other people are also experiencing problems.” For companies like large banks, with tens of millions of customers, that’s not necessarily very meaningful except for the people who happen to be experiencing the issue.

That's why downdetector shows a chart, which is basically a chart of how many people clicked "I'm having a problem with this service". Of course you get a small amount of people having issues, but if you suddenly see a big spike on the graph, it's a good sign that it's broken for many more people than usual.

Or at least: It's a sign that people were compelled to push a button.

I've seen it happen over and over again when a wireless provider like Verizon or a docsis provider like Spectrum has a widespread outage that is isolated to their service: People push the wrong button.

Verizon issue, other providers fine? Verizon spikes on downdetector, but so do reports of AT&T and T-Mobile problems.

Same with Spectrum: When it's screwed up for whatever reason, reports for other ISPs also spike.

This happens even when those other systems are completely unaffected and working just fine.

Downdetector does provide useful data, but it's not necessarily clean data that establishes anything clear on its own.

Alternatively, and from the top of the HSBC homepage

"We would like to apologise for any inconvenience and continue to monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations."

They're always up with cartel cash.

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