Yeah, it's far from ideal, but in my experience its accuracy is better than most anything else readily available, including the official status pages maintained by most tech companies.

Yeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports. Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very recent issue - even before downdetector itself recognizes it as such.

Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.

It's fine in simpler cases but as we're seeing here, is absolutely useless at providing information on failures in complex systems. It appears that it was one network suffering issues but this was then reported as "EVERY MOBILE NETWORK IN THE UK IS DOWN" because people just go "I tried to make a call and it didn't connect". That could be anything from a single cell tower being hit by a truck to a nationwide power outage.