About IsItDown.now

What this site does

Three things, in order of how useful they are to you.

First, it checks any website on demand. You type an address, our server requests it from a network that has nothing to do with yours, and we tell you what came back - Including which stage of the request failed. That one step settles the question people actually have, which is not "is this site down" but "is this my problem".

Second, it monitors a list of widely used services continuously. Every service in our directory is probed every 20 minutes, every result is stored, and every outage is recorded with a start time, an end time and a duration. Over months that becomes something a single check cannot give you: A record.

Third, it collects what users are seeing. An automated check is precise and narrow. It runs from one place and asks for one page, which means it will confidently report that a service is fine while its login system is broken for half the planet. People notice that immediately. So there is a report button on every page, and the reports appear on a chart next to our own measurements - Clearly labelled as what they are.

What it will not do

It will not tell you a service is down because a lot of people said so. Reports never change the recorded uptime figure and never open an incident. That is a deliberate constraint: The moment a crowd can move the official number, the number is worth nothing, and any motivated group can make a competitor look unreliable.

It will not invent a page for a service we do not really monitor. A great many sites in this category generate a page for every domain anyone has ever searched for, which is how you end up with tens of thousands of near-identical pages containing a hostname and nothing else. Every service here has a description someone wrote and a check that genuinely runs.

It will not present itself as authoritative about someone else's infrastructure. When a company publishes its own status page, we link to it and say plainly that it is the authoritative source. We are an outside observer with one vantage point, and the site is written to make that limitation obvious rather than to hide it.

Who runs it

IsItDown.now is operated independently. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any of the companies whose services it monitors, and the names, trademarks and logos used throughout the site belong to their respective owners. We use them descriptively, because there is no other way to tell you whether Facebook is down than to say the word Facebook and show you which Facebook we mean. Any company that would rather we did not display its icon only has to ask.

There is no relationship, commercial or otherwise, between a company's status on this site and anything that company does. We do not accept payment to add, remove, favour or suppress a service, and no monitored company has any input into what appears on its page.

How it is paid for

The site is funded by its operator. It does not sell backlinks, sponsored posts, guest posts or placements in any list, and it does not accept paid entries in the service directory. If that ever changes, this paragraph will change with it and any commercial relationship will be labelled on the page it affects.

Corrections

If something here is wrong - A service described inaccurately, an outage recorded that did not happen, a guide that has gone out of date - Tell us and we will fix it. Corrections to articles are noted on the article. This matters more on a site like this than on most: Publishing that a company's service was unavailable is a claim about that company, and it needs to be right.