Tag: Downdetector

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had a major service disruption early yesterday morning, affecting many travelers in the United States. Data from Downdetector® shows all of the major airlines experienced a spike in user-reported issues around the time of the outage, with a sharp rise in problem reports just before 8:00 a.m. EST. While the FAA had a nationwide computer outage that delayed the departure of hundreds of flights, Downdetector data shows all of the major airlines in the U.S. began to experience upticks in user-reported issues (mostly delays) starting at around 7:30 a.m. EST, and peaking at about 9:30 a.m. EST, and dropping in frequency shortly after that.

At 8:50 a.m. EST, the FAA lifted the stop on flights taking off, with NBC News reporting more than 6,500 flights delayed. While the problem reports started to subside after about an hour, travelers who were flying yesterday felt the aftershocks of the FAA ground stop as airlines tried to make up for the delay and travelers scrambled to reach connecting flights on time. While this issue may have been unavoidable, data from Downdetector could have alerted aviation stakeholders much more quickly, saving time, resources, and mean-time to resolution.

Downdetector Enterprise™ can help your company monitor third-party services your business relies on, such as CDN providers, so you know immediately when they go down. Using Downdetector’s real-time alerts you can quickly adjust communications to better serve your customers. Contact us here to learn how your network operations, DevOps, engineering and customer care teams can get faster outage detection. Read more here about the different types of outages and what contributes to them.

When you want to check your internet performance, you take a Speedtest®. If you can’t connect to a site, you check Downdetector®. Now, we’ve added a new Downdetector tab in the Speedtest app so you can do both in one location. This combines the internet’s most trusted app for testing connectivity with Downdetector’s real-time status information for over 12,000 apps, websites, and services across in 47 countries — with one tap. Using these free utilities, you can now diagnose whether your connection is in trouble or if there’s a larger service issue all in one place.

This is the same methodology we use for the Downdetector site you’ve come to trust. It’s simply in a more convenient location.

Check for online outages

Tap the “Status” tab at the bottom center of the Speedtest app to see a snapshot of the current status of the apps, websites, and services Downdetector monitors, tailored to show what’s most relevant in your country. Sites and services that are experiencing problems will appear at the top, giving you a quick view of whether the problem you’re experiencing is more widespread. Read more about how a few critical services can take down chunks of the internet here.

Check for details on a specific incident

Tap any site or service on the status page for a more detailed view of what’s going on. You’ll see a graph of incident reports over the last 24 hours as well as a chart of what types of issues users have reported. You can also tap on the blue button at the bottom of the page to submit your own report to Downdetector including information about your experience. This helps other users understand what they might also be experiencing.

Coming soon

This update is currently rolling out to Android and iOS devices worldwide. Update your Speedtest app if you don’t see the Downdetector tab. Soon we’ll also be adding in the ability to search for a specific site or service. Keep an eye out for this and other improvements as you troubleshoot your internet connectivity in the Speedtest app.

Download the Speedtest app for Android or iOS today to check out this new feature and let us know what you think on Twitter or Facebook.

Every internet user has encountered a website being down, an app not working, or even a browser failing to connect to the internet. Every day, thousands of users like you use Downdetector® to report real issues for websites and apps, but the outage you’re experiencing is often more complicated than it seems. We’re here to identify the major points of failure for the internet so you can understand what is happening and how long you might expect services to be down. Read on to find out what’s really going on during these incidents and how one service can cause critical failures across the internet.

What a large outage or incident looks like

Over the past few years, the internet has been hobbled by major outages. Some of these incidents lasted for hours (and even days) and prevented people from accessing online services like websites, streaming video platforms, social media, mobile apps, ATMs, emergency services, and more. 

On the best of days, you can simply log onto the internet with the ease of clicking open a browser. However, the internet is a complex web of interconnected parts that exist on physical servers around the world. Often, when one part of the internet has an issue, it cascades to other services and companies that depend on that particular component. For example, if your internet service provider (ISP) blinks out, you might think that the site you were just visiting is down, while others using a different ISP can use the site just fine. Similarly, when you can’t access a website or app you want to use, the root cause might not be the app or website, like when an AWS incident took out Netflix in April 2021.

These five potential points of failure can take down the internet and online services

Internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile operators connect you to the web

The simplest internet outage to understand occurs when an ISP or mobile operator goes down or can’t be accessed. This can happen for many reasons, including a severed fiber line or a power outage taking out a local cell tower. When an ISP or mobile network suffers an outage, the internet still functions correctly, but your computer or device won’t be able to access it. This is frustrating and also makes it complicated to identify what the problem even is. 

One way to figure out if your ISP or mobile provider is down is to try to access the internet from a different network (if you’re on mobile, try your computer; if you’re on your computer, try your mobile network). If the site is accessible on the other device, you may have a carrier or ISP outage. Check with your ISP on Downdetector or social media to see if they are aware of the problem, then know they are hard at work on fixing it. Usually these types of outages are resolved within a couple of hours. 

Fixed Broadband ISPs

ISPs can go down due to hardware failures, severed cable lines, natural disasters, human error, or even network cyberattacks. These are often contained to small local areas, but some ISP incidents have been nationwide.

Consumers and businesses both rely on ISPs to offer and access internet-based services. When a specific ISP does go down, cities, banks, businesses, online gaming, point-of-sale devices, and more that use single ISPs can all face outages because those services may depend on specific ISP access to the internet. But that doesn’t mean everything goes down in your area if one ISP goes down in an area; if other ISPs are operational, they’ll be able to connect to the internet. This is why some businesses use multiple ISPs to insure against outages.

If you think your ISP may be down, check Downdetector on your phone for real-time incident reports by users in your area. For those who are comfortable with running terminal commands, you can run `mtr -rn 8.8.8.8` to see which hop within your connection may be having issues. 

Mobile operators

You’ve probably seen a cell tower in your neighborhood. Mobile networks connect your device to the internet using radio waves collected by those towers and other infrastructure. When a mobile network goes down, either the equipment sending or receiving radio waves is having an issue or the network that equipment connects to is having an issue. This may be contained as a local issue with a single mobile deployment, but mobile networks aren’t immune from larger incidents. Though more rare, mobile outages can be caused by natural disasters, faulty equipment, or human error. 

For you, a mobile outage means you may not be able to text or call from your mobile network until the problem is resolved. If you think your mobile operator may be down, use your computer to check Downdetector for real-time incident reports by users in your area.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) deliver critical content

CDNs allow content (like images, videos, and other critical parts of websites) to be stored physically closer to you using networks of point of presence servers (POPs) around the world. Websites and apps use CDNs to dramatically speed up and stabilize your experience, because the information has to travel less distance and bypass potential bottlenecks on the internet. In addition, many ISPs and mobile operators have CDN POPs within their own networks, further reducing the distance a request has to travel to be fulfilled. 

CDNs are a vital part of modern internet infrastructure and are particularly helpful when a service needs to respond quickly to increased demand. Examples include a surge in online shopping on Cyber Monday or a rush of viewers streaming the next episode of that most popular TV show. Still, CDNs can experience incidents that impact their reliability. Since these are consolidation points for internet traffic, CDN outages can have huge effects on a wide range of internet services all at once. When CDNs go down, sites aren’t able to be served and apps aren’t able to receive the content stored on these networks. These failures make the sites and services appear to be down. CDN failures can stem from coding bugs or a cyberattack. CDN issues are often difficult to diagnose since they operate behind the scenes and cover specific geographies. This means a CDN network can work in one part of the world, while other parts experience a blanket outage for all the businesses that depend on it. 

One indicator that you might be dealing with a CDN outage is if a group of sites and services that rely on one CDN provider are all showing issues on Downdetector in your area, as you can see on the image above related to the Akamai service outage of June 2021. We will often flag CDN outages on Downdetector with a banner to show how trending incidents may be connected.

Domain Name System (DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) direct internet traffic

DNS and BGP are two systems that serve as the foundation for the global internet. You could say that DNS defines the addresses to which packets of information need to navigate and BGP effectively defines the roads of the internet. Without directions from DNS and BGP, the internet would not function. DNS and BGP issues can be contained or they can cause global internet outages.

Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS provides the connection between human names and network addresses — every website has a domain name (like speedtest.net), which DNS translates to a string of numbers that forms the IP address for every site you visit. Without DNS, your browser won’t be able to determine where to send a request to, like attempting to drive to a business without being able to find their address.

DNS incidents can either be caused by a bad DNS record which sends traffic to the wrong location or if a large DNS provider has issues responding to requests. Because DNS servers are so important, there are many redundancies to prevent global failure — but they can go down due to cyber attacks, power incidents, or human error. 

If the DNS issue is on your equipment, it can sometimes be resolved by restarting your router and/or modem, clearing your device’s DNS cache, or even switching browsers. Larger DNS issues can be identified by querying a server (if you feel confident doing so), and you can also go to Downdetector to see if it’s a larger issue impacting many people. Visitors to Downdetector will often leave a comment if they’ve run a query and found a DNS issue.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

BGP is the routing system for the internet, receiving routing information from other networks on the internet and using Autonomous Systems (AS) to find the fastest and most efficient path to connect your device to the destination network. BGP isn’t centralized or controlled by any party, it’s up to internet providers to provide accurate and trustworthy information to other peer networks. BGP-related outages often are due to bad routing information being shared across the internet, which causes data to be sent to incorrect networks. 

BGP issues can be harder to identify, because when BGP goes down, the route to a particular network doesn’t appear to exist even if it’s there — and information can’t automatically update because everything is decentralized. Visit Downdetector to troubleshoot your outage. You can learn more about whether the incident is caused by a BGP issue by checking the comments. Because of the decentralized nature of these outages, the issue may take a while to resolve.  Be prepared to maybe take a walk or find something to do until the engineers work it all out.

Services and their Application Programming Interfaces (API) direct programs communicating

The final type of widespread incident types on our list involves service failures. When services go down, they may impact other applications that communicate and rely upon them through an API. An API is an interface that enables two or more programs to communicate together. For example, a weather app on your mobile device may fetch forecast info from a weather station’s API. If that API is down, your weather app may display a blank content box or not work at all. 

APIs include everything from applications like Google Maps interfacing with GPS data to get you to a destination, posting a photo to Instagram or Twitter with the your device’s camera app, sending a GIF from Giphy on your messaging app, completing a transaction on a commerce site with a payment app like PayPal, and security protocol programs like Auth0 or OneLogin that provide single sign-on services for additional security to your logins.

With many companies increasingly relying on external services for payment services (Square and Stripe), security measures (OneLogin and Google Safe Browsing), programming queries (Javascript and Python), storage (Dropbox and Google Drive), and many other different service APIs like Spotify, incidents at these types of services can have huge impacts across the internet.

Diagnosing a problem caused by a service or their API isn’t straightforward. Often, service issues stem from a coding error that occurs that doesn’t allow the program to communicate information to the service’s API. Engineers at the services monitor service health carefully, but these errors may only occur in edge cases, or for a small subset of users. Even if a service doesn’t have a large amount of reports on Downdetector, check the comments to see if anyone else is reporting a similar issue to yours. 

Downdetector is your first line of support during a widespread incident

Do you think your service or internet is down? First, check your device or router and restart those. If that doesn’t work, go to Downdetector to report your incident with the internet or service you’re trying to reach and see if other users are reporting the same issues you are, or if there are other root causes that may be contributing to an incident you’re experiencing. Remember, while Downdetector can detect widespread issues, it does not diagnose them, so after logging your issue on Downdetector, check in with the service you’re having trouble with to see if they have any error reports.

Having issues with the internet can be a huge headache, so we hope this article helps you better understand what’s going on with your internet experience. Do you want to stay on top of issues that might be affecting your internet experience? Download the Downdetector app for iOS or Android.

When a webpage isn’t loading or you’re having problems logging into your favorite service, you can turn to Downdetector® to see what’s happening. The world’s most popular source for user-generated status information, Downdetector tracks over 6,000 services across 45 countries. Each Downdetector company status page displays details about where other people have reported issues with a service. It also displays tweets and comments from a community of other users trying to troubleshoot the problem. Often, Downdetector users are aware of potential problems long before the service provider itself has reported an issue. In other cases, users may believe they’re experiencing an issue with an application, only to discover the source of the issue is actually with their internet service provider.

How Downdetector collects reports about a problem

In addition to problem reports submitted directly on Downdetector status pages, a site or service’s status information is gathered from user interactions with a variety of sources across the web, including search engines like Google and social media platforms like Twitter. This provides a holistic view of a perceived service interruption.

The most telling way users report a problem with an online service is through the service’s status page on Downdetector’s website. By clicking the “I have a problem with [Service]” button, a user can easily report an issue, plus indicate what type of problem they are experiencing from a list of common issues.

Downdetector also gathers data about the status of a service through Twitter. Each monitored company is configured with a list of inclusion words that are used to identify tweets that may be relevant to the status of that company’s online service. A tweet is scored on the basis of relevance to the monitored company and the sentiment of the content to determine whether it should be counted as a problem report.

Downdetector also looks at other key indicators from across the web to determine if an extraordinary volume of users is having issues with a monitored company or service.

How Downdetector attributes outage reports to a location

Downdetector users can quickly see if other users in their area are experiencing an issue with a service — or if the potential problem is more widespread. When a user submits a problem report on Downdetector, the report is attributed to the location and country. In the case that a user in one country submits a report on the Downdetector site for another country, the system determines whether or not that service is monitored on the site associated with the user’s geolocated country. If it is, the problem report is attributed to the service for the user’s actual location. If the service is not monitored in that country, the information is collected and stored but not attributed as a report against the service for the other location.

Final criteria for an outage determination

Downdetector applies a rigorous data methodology to determine whether a sufficient volume of users is experiencing an issue and then assigns a status based on these problem indicators. A handful of isolated problem reports is not a likely indicator of an outage or other service issue. Downdetector only reports an issue if a significant number of users are impacted. To that end, Downdetector calculates a baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service monitored, based on the average number of reports for that given time of day over the last year. Downdetector’s incident detection system compares the current number of problem reports to this baseline and only reports an issue if the current volume significantly exceeds the typical volume of reports.

It is common for users to want to generate multiple reports when they are experiencing problems, especially over an extended service interruption. To prevent a single user from skewing incident detection evaluations, Downdetector only accepts a user’s first report for a specific company each day.

Service interruptions are frustrating and inconvenient. Downdetector provides a convenient way for users to check on a service’s status and see if they’re experiencing a widespread issue and see what the community is saying about a service. For companies, Downdetector’s user-generated data offers a holistic view of what users are reporting and determines the root cause of user-perceived outages. To get real-time information on your favorite services, visit your country’s Downdetector website or follow Downdetector on Twitter or Facebook.

Cloud computing giant Google Cloud Platform, experienced issues earlier today causing users across the world to experience problems when trying to access their favorite online services. According to data from Downdetector®, Google Cloud Platform started to experience elevated problem reports around 12:42 p.m. EST. Shortly after, users flocked to Downdetector to report issues with countless services, including: Etsy, Discord, Nest, Spotify, Target, The Home Depot and more.

As of 1:21 p.m. EST, GCP Incidents tweeted that the issue was partially resolved but did not have an ETA on when there would be a full resolution. While it seems like the spike in problem reports has passed for most affected companies, users were still left frustrated when they couldn’t access their favorite services.

Downdetector Enterprise^TM can help your company monitor third-party services your business relies on, such as cloud computing services, so you know immediately when they go down. Using Downdetector’s real-time alerts you can quickly adjust communications to better serve your customers. Contact us here to learn how your network operations, DevOps, engineering and customer care teams can get faster outage detection.

The shift from in-person to online banking has been under way for years, but the pandemic has cemented digital banking as the new normal for most consumers. As a result, it’s critical to effectively communicate and resolve issues when customers experience a disruption in your service. Diagnosing the issue and detecting problems with external services can be challenging for technical operations and IT management teams — especially when internal monitoring tools don’t detect any problems. That’s where Downdetector® comes in.

Over 25 million consumers report problems each month with online banking, financial services companies, internet service providers and other websites and services. Downdetector can alert you when customers are reporting issues with your services — often long before internal monitoring tools send out the alarm. By monitoring your company, external services like content delivery networks (CDNs) and web hosting platforms, internal productivity tools and your customers’ sentiment surrounding emergent problems, your team can troubleshoot issues faster, decrease mean time to recovery (MTTR) and provide your customers with better, more contextual support.

The upcoming Downdetector webinar on Oct. 28 will show you how some of the world’s leading banks and financial service providers are using Downdetector Enterprise^™ to detect and resolve issues faster, as well as manage the customer experience during an issue.

Read on to discover three ways Downdetector Enterprise can help banks and financial service providers detect issues faster and improve the customer experience during an incident.

Conduct competitive benchmarking and monitor external services your company relies on

After an incident occurs, business intelligence and incident management teams are often pressed to answer the questions: “Did our competitors experience similar problems?” and “Was the issue a problem with our services or an external service our company relies on, such as a downstream payment processor?”

Downdetector Enterprise makes it easy for teams to answer these questions with competitive intelligence and analysis of the services your company relies on.

Teams can get visibility into competitors’ problem reports on Downdetector, which offers quick insight into whether or not competitors are facing similar issues. If internal monitoring tools aren’t indicating that there’s an issue, this view can also help you diagnose if an external service, such as a CDN, is experiencing similar patterns in elevated problem reports, you can infer that it might be an issue with the CDN impacting customers.

Access real-time and historical data to validate internal monitoring

Banks and financial service companies often look to Downdetector’s real-time and historical data to validate whether findings in internal monitoring tools have impacted customer experience — or fill in the gaps when internal monitoring tools don’t detect a known problem.

For example, during the Facebook outage Oct. 4, 2021, a Fortune 500 bank turned to Downdetector Enterprise when problem reports escalated — but their internal monitoring systems hadn’t detected any problems. They were able to use data from Downdetector Enterprise to see that Facebook was experiencing issues. From there, they were able to determine that problem reports weren’t due to an internal problem, and then communicate to their customer base that issues were likely related to Facebook’s outage.

However, if the incident is determined to be internal, business intelligence teams can use Downdetector Enterprise to analyze historical outage information to spot any patterns. Historical data can also be used for reporting and compliance purposes, such as communication with a regulatory body after customers have reported an incident. The Downdetector API makes it easy to integrate and surface this data directly in your existing tools.

Directly communicate with customers who report an issue on Downdetector

Companies that don’t provide timely, contextual communication during an incident are likely to see dissatisfied customers flooding social media and customer support channels looking for answers. Downdetector allows companies to provide direct communication to customers reporting issues with specific aspects of your service, such as mobile banking or payments.

This additional communication channel is available even if your website or other services go down — and typically helps lower call center and digital support ticket volume.

Ready to see how leading U.S. and European banks have improved their incident management and customer experience using customer-reported data? Join the upcoming webinar; all registrants will receive a link to the recorded presentation.

As we welcome the start of 2022, Downdetector® is celebrating 10 years of monitoring online service outages. Connectivity plays an integral role in how our society functions, and Downdetector has supported consumers and businesses during the most notable service outages of the last decade.

Take, for instance, the massive outage of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger in October 2021. When these platforms went dark, billions of users felt the impact. Besides losing access to these social media platforms, which many businesses rely on for revenue generation, Facebook also serves as an online authenticator for countless internet applications. This resulted in many seemingly unrelated services becoming unavailable, making for an especially chaotic day on the internet. Throughout the incident, Downdetector provided a live global view of problem reports, helping consumers and service providers diagnose the root cause of the issue.

During this and other major service disruptions, Downdetector has kept the world informed with near-real-time analysis on millions of user-submitted reports – and we’ll be there for whatever outages may lie ahead as we continue to expand.

Downdetector began with the need for better outage detection

Feeling frustrated by the lack of incident information, founders Tom Sanders and Sander van de Graaf started Downdetector in 2012 as a platform to empower consumers to improve their internet experience with early outage detection. In particular, Dutch banking services were experiencing a high number of incidents at the time, so Sanders and van de Graaf created Downdetector to help the public identify connectivity disruptions. Downdetector proved to be so insightful that the Dutch parliament even used it to raise awareness with the former minister of finance.

Downdetector by the numbers

Since Downdetector launched, the platform has grown to serve hundreds of millions of users, tracking thousands of services across 47 countries and counting. Celebrating 10 years, here’s a quick snapshot of Downdetector’s global footprint.

Reducing downtime for the world’s leading service providers

By analyzing over 25 million user reports on Downdetector each month, Downdetector Enterprise™ gives businesses a direct line of sight into problems consumers are experiencing with their services. The world’s largest internet service providers, mobile network operators, banks, streaming entertainment services, social media platforms, online gaming providers, and other technology companies use the enterprise platform to rapidly diagnose both internal and external issues.

With early alerting, these businesses can rapidly assess the size, causes, and impacted locations of an incident. And with insights into third-party service issues that impact their own customer experience, they can quickly respond to incidents and proactively keep customers informed.

We’ll be there to continue providing insights on connectivity to both consumers and businesses as we keep expanding. If you’re ready to add real-time alerting and customer experience insights to your existing monitoring solutions, please visit our Downdetector Enterprise page to learn more.