The title reminds me of the 5th installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

"Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."

The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.

Unfortunately this website relies on Tailwind's CDN for styling, which in turn is deployed on Vercel, which in turn is mostly hosted on AWS.

Clearly, the proper solution is to have a p2p mesh of down detectors.

As per usual, all new is something old, well-forgotten.

I'm not affiliated with this genius. I was just snooping around the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012), took a chance at modifying the site's URL, and found myself pleasantly surprised.

It would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.

And a page monitoring this one: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=o398t...

This one looks like it's behind a CDN, at least

Can it detect when it itself is down

Just thinking about it, wouldn't a distributed P2P "mesh" be a better fit for reliability probing? We could share results, see where it was inaccessible from. It's kind of an oxymoron to have a centralized down detector lol

I'm almost wishing for the next major outage just so I can see this working :-)

yes, downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector is available.

who detects the down detectors's down detector's downs?

its down detectors all the way down

Hm, looks like this site is down.

Seems like this madness is only going to end when we hit the 63-character limit for domain name labels.

The ultimate down detector should have a fixed IP address as well, in the case of other stuff failing as well

Who watches the watchmen indeed

Down detectors all the way down

I think we need to make a highly-available downdetector from a collection of SBCs hosted around the world. Each node gets its configuration via git-pull which is self-hosted/republished. Simplest DNS configuration possible: each node has a unique $n.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com while they also happily host a common hostname with simple dns round robin entries for it.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com. The common page attempts to load a check resource (perhaps just a tiny css output?) from all of the $n.i.u.c nodes which just changes a div from gray to green/red.

It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests.

With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s