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.

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.

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.

Gaming companies can’t always rely on internal monitoring tools when individual users are experiencing problems with their service — and when issues that impact gameplay are caused by external services, diagnosing the root cause can be tricky. Millions of gamers use Downdetector® to report and understand problems with their favorite online games. The world’s leading game developers and hosts use this data to detect and resolve service issues faster. 

Register for our webinar on July 26th to learn how you can can monitor user-reported problems and third-party services to improve your players’ experience and keep downtime to a minimum. In this article, we share a preview of data from a major gaming outage that affected many popular online games, including Apex Legends.

Detecting and monitoring service disruptions

Downdetector monitors over 12,000 services worldwide. Users can go to your company’s page and submit a report if they are experiencing issues with the service. These user-submitted reports can be monitored by service teams within the Downdetector Enterprise™ dashboard.

On June 25th, 2023, there was a surge of reports of issues with Apex Legends, a popular free-to-play hero shooter video game. In the images below, you can see that over 3,500 users reported issues with the service, with the majority indicating that “server connection” was the main problem. We can also view the locations and density of where the reports originated.

Downdetector can detect when these service disruptions occur and rapidly trigger an alert for providers. Using a proprietary algorithm, Downdetector Enterprise can detect when the number of reports are significantly higher than the average number of alerts for that day and time. Service providers can sign up for email alerts for their services and third-party services. Further, these alerts can be integrated through an RSS feed within internal monitoring tools and apps, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

In this case, those who are tracking Apex Legends would be notified by email and RSS alerts once elevated reports were seen at about 5 p.m. Central. They could then monitor the service disruption within the dashboard, refreshing user-submitted reports in intervals as quick as thirty seconds.

Leveraging user-reported problems to diagnose the root cause 

In order to understand the cause and severity of the issue, we can compare across the gaming industry to check if competitors or third-party services were experiencing similar issues. The image below shows elevated reports across other popular games including FiveM, Dota 2, and Destiny at the same time that Apex Legends players were logging issues on Downdetector.

This comparative view helps us determine that these games share the same video game distribution service, Steam. When looking at Steam’s dashboard in Downdetector Enterprise, we see that there were over 200,000 reports of gamers experiencing issues with the service during the same time frame. We can therefore correlate the service disruption experienced by players of Apex Legends with the greater third-party outage occurring on Steam. 

This example highlights the critical role that Downdetector Enterprise has in helping gaming companies rapidly detect and diagnose the root cause of service disruptions.  

Are you prepared to resolve your game’s next outage?

Downdetector Enterprise allows gaming providers to detect and resolve outages that impact the gaming experience. With early alerting, you can rapidly determine the size, location, and potential impact of a service issue, decreasing resolution time and keeping your players’ downtime to a minimum. 

If you’d like to learn more about how the world’s leading game developers and hosts are monitoring service disruptions, please join our upcoming webinar at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 4 p.m. BST on Wednesday, July 26th. A recording will be provided for registrants who can’t join the live presentation. Register Now. 

Facebook is currently experiencing a rarely seen global outage that is taking out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

3:30 p.m. PDT — The outage appears to be resolved

As of 3:30 p.m. PDT, Facebook is back up and user reports to Downdetector are declining. This is how Luke Deryckx, CTO of Ookla®, summed up today’s events:

The global Facebook outage is now one of the largest ever tracked on Downdetector® in terms of the total number of reports (over 14 million as of 3:30 p.m. PDT) and duration; this is an extremely impactful event.

The combined popularity of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger means that billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely offline today. But the scope of the impact extends far beyond direct users of these services.

Many people may not realize the reach of Facebook’s services into other seemingly unrelated applications. Facebook operates one of the largest advertising networks in the world, used by countless websites and mobile applications. Facebook also provides a method to authenticate (log in) for users of many internet applications. Any service that relies on Facebook for any part of its infrastructure will have experienced problems today to a varying degree.

The cascading impact of an outage to a core service like this can be confusing for people experiencing problems with a service seemingly completely unrelated to Facebook. When Facebook goes down, it’s a bad day on the internet, and today is particularly stormy.

We make a point to highlight the most widespread outages on Downdetector with a banner at the top of the page to inform our users where the true source of the outage likely lies.

1:00 p.m. PDT — A global view of the outage

The Facebook outage continues and has become the largest outage we’ve ever seen on Downdetector with over 10.6 million problem reports from all over the globe. The U.S. had the most reports at over 1.7 million followed by Germany (1.3 million), the Netherlands (915,000), the United Kingdom (789,000) and Italy (400,000).

We are also seeing an increase in reports across many other online sites and services as the Facebook outage causes cascading impacts. Expect a turbulent day on the internet.

10:00 a.m. PDT — Facebook outage extends across all the company’s apps

No word yet from Facebook on what caused the outage, but as of 9:30 a.m. PDT, we saw over 5.6 million reports about issues with the company’s services from around the world on Downdetector. The reports started rolling in around 8:15 a.m. PDT and are continuing.

In the U.S. alone there were upwards of 123,000 problem reports for Facebook, 98,000 for Instagram, 34,000 for WhatsApp and 9,800 for Facebook Messenger. Most users are reporting troubles with the website and apps overall.

This outage is still very much ongoing. Turn to the Downdetector pages for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for up to the minute updates.

Editor’s note: This article changed form on October 4 to include a timetable of updates. The content itself was unchanged.