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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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“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.

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