Downdector Outage Led to 3 Alternatives

Thanks to the Cloudflare outage of November 18, the site monitor was one of many sites that weren’t working. The site monitor checks the statuses of many websites, thanks to user reports. These statuses can tell whether a site being down is on your end. This led people to make their own site outage monitors. According to PC Gamer, the outage resulted in three alternatives to the site status aggregate.

Cloudflare’s outage happened because of a “change in a database systems’ permissions.” The outage affected sites and platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and many more. The cybersecurity firm offers a service to protect sites from being overwhelmed with traffic, especially during DDoS attacks.

Downdetector’s Alternatives

There are three alternatives to the site outage monitor. There is Downdetector’s Downdetector, created by Gus Owen, the creator of TimeGuessr. Next, we have the detector for that site. Finally, because of the 63-character limit for domain names (specifically, the space between the dots), we have Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector.

Cloudflare’s outage is the second major online outage affecting many websites. In October, the Internet practically shut down because of Amazon Web Services’ outage. The AWS outage affected sites and platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, and Roblox.

Is It Back Up, Or is it Just Me?

So far, all site status monitors are fully functional. However, the outage is another reason to lament how everything relies on the Internet and web services to function. Today, there are fewer things that don’t rely on an Internet connection.

Cloudflare’s outage emphasizes its role as a piece of online infrastructure which many sites rely on. The site “provides performance and security to website owners via its intelligent global network.” It began as a way to find sources of email spam but grew to protect websites from “all manner of attacks, while simultaneously optimizing performance.”