In a peculiar turn of events, Downdetector, a website designed to monitor the status of online services like Discord, faced its own outages earlier this week during a significant downtime experienced by Cloudflare. This unusual situation led Gus Owen, the creator of the web game TimeGuessr, to propose a tongue-in-cheek solution: a “Downdetector for Downdetector.”
Owen’s creation, humorously dubbed Downdetector’s Downdetector, serves to check the operational status of the original Downdetector website. Despite some skepticism regarding its effectiveness, the satirical site quickly gained traction on the Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum, encouraging a wave of lighthearted internet fun.
Following this initial launch, others continued to expand on the joke, creating further iterations such as Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector and even Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector. Each of these new websites checks the status of the previous version, creating an amusing chain of recursive monitoring.
As of now, all the sites, including the original Downdetector and its various iterations, are operational. However, it remains a challenge to verify the functionality of the last one due to the absence of a higher-level tracker.
Interestingly, a member of the Hacker News community pointed out a technical limitation regarding domain length. The maximum allowable length for a part of a domain name is 63 characters, rendering the creation of certain extended domains impractical. While this limitation hampers some configurations, alternatives such as modifying the name or employing subdomains remain viable.
The Cloudflare outage that instigated this humorous sequence was not a result of a cyberattack but rather stemmed from an accidental change in “database systems’ permissions.” The incident highlights our dependency on the internet and its numerous points of failure, yet also provides a glimpse into the resourcefulness and creativity of the web community. Ultimately, the proliferation of these playful Downdetectors serves as a reminder that even in the face of downtime, humor and innovation can prevail.