News & media status
Publishers whose traffic multiplies during exactly the events that stress them. All 2 are checked every 20 minutes; the status beside each one is the result of its most recent check.
News sites fail at exactly the moment they matter, because the event that makes people visit is the same event that multiplies their traffic tenfold in a single minute.
How reliable news & media has been, last 30 days
Measured by our own checks, run every 20 minutes, not taken from any provider’s status page. 2 of 2 services have enough history to report.
| Service | Now | Uptime 30d | Downtime | Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BBC | Up | 100.0% | none | 228 ms |
| The New York Times | Up | 100.0% | none | 199 ms |
The New York Times has been the steadiest here over the last 30 days. Uptime is observed uptime: The share of measured time our checks got a usable answer. It excludes nothing, including announced maintenance.
Why news & media services go down
Publishers run for ordinary weekday traffic, not for the once-a-year story. When that story breaks, load can rise by a factor of ten within a minute, and the part that fails first is almost never the article. It is the surrounding machinery: Comments, live blogs, personalisation, advertising, each of which is a separate service and each of which can take the page down with it.
Advertising is the under-appreciated cause here. A page that loads content quickly can still be unusable because a third-party ad or analytics script has stalled the render. To a reader that is an outage; to the publisher’s own monitoring, the site is up and fast.
What an outage here looks like
The page half-loads: Text appears and the layout never settles, or the article renders and the live blog does not update. Cached versions work while anything personalised fails.
When these services are under most strain
Breaking news, results nights and markets opening. This category has the sharpest and least predictable spikes in the directory.
At a glance
- Typical duration
- 15 to 60 minutes, tracking the news cycle
- Usual cause
- Traffic spike, or a third-party script on the page
- Tell-tale sign
- Text appears, page never finishes loading
- Predictability
- Lowest of any category here
What to do when news & media is down
- Use reader mode. It bypasses most of the machinery that actually failed, and the article itself is usually being served perfectly.
- Try the AMP or mobile version. Stripped-down versions survive load that the full page does not.
- Assume it is load, not an attack. Publishers are attacked, but an outage during a major story is overwhelmingly just the story.
Still not sure whether it is them or you? Check the site from our servers - We are on a different network, a different resolver and a different route from you.