Editorial policy

Who writes this

Every guide and every service description on IsItDown.now is written and reviewed by the site's editorial team. Articles are stored as files in version control rather than in a content database, which has a practical consequence worth stating: Nobody who obtains an administrator session can quietly alter a published article. Changing one requires a change to the codebase.

Articles carry a publication date and, where they have been revised, a separate revision date. The revision date is only updated when the substance changes - Not to make an old page look new, which is a tactic this site does not use.

What we publish

An article exists here when it answers a question a person genuinely arrives with, in more depth than a search result snippet can. The test applied before anything is written is simple: Could a reasonably informed person finish this page knowing something they could act on? If the honest answer is no, the page is not written.

That rules out a whole category of content the web is full of. We do not publish pages that restate a definition everybody already has, pages assembled to occupy a keyword, or near-duplicate articles that differ only in the noun. If two topics would produce substantially the same article, they are one article.

What we refuse to publish

• Sponsored posts, guest posts and paid placements. Not in the guides, not in the blog, not in the service directory. There is no price and no exception.
• Paid or exchanged links. No link on this site has been sold, bought, swapped or placed as part of an arrangement. We do not participate in link exchanges or private blog networks, and we do not accept "collaboration" offers, whatever they are dressed up as.
• Machine-generated filler. Automation is used to gather monitoring data. It is not used to manufacture articles.
• Invented outages or fabricated history. Every incident published came from a check that failed. We do not seed a new service's page with plausible-looking history to make it look established.
• Reviews or ratings we have not made. There is no star rating anywhere on this site, and correspondingly no review structured data, because marking up a rating that does not exist is exactly the kind of mismatch that structured-data guidelines prohibit.

Accuracy and sourcing

Claims about how a service is built, where it runs, or what a past outage was caused by come from the provider's own published post-mortems, status page history and engineering write-ups wherever those exist. Where a claim is an inference from observed behaviour rather than something a provider has confirmed, the article says so in the sentence.

Error codes, thresholds and technical behaviour are described as they actually are, including where that is inconvenient. If the honest answer to "will waiting fix this?" is "no, and here is what you have to do instead", that is what the page says.

Links to other sites

We link out when a reader is better served elsewhere - Most often to a provider's official status page, which is always more authoritative about that provider than we are. Outbound links are editorial choices; none is paid for and none is reciprocal.

Links inside user comments are rendered as plain text and are never anchors. There is nothing in the comment system for a link seller to buy, which is the most reliable way to stop them trying.

Corrections

Mistakes get fixed, and substantive fixes are noted on the article rather than made silently. If we have described a service inaccurately, recorded an outage that did not happen, or published something that has since become wrong, tell us. Corrections involving a named company are treated as urgent, because publishing that a company's service failed is a claim about that company and it needs to be right.

Advertising and affiliate disclosure

At the time of writing this site carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content. If that changes, every affected placement will be labelled on the page it appears on, affiliate links will carry the appropriate rel attributes, and this paragraph will be rewritten to describe what actually exists rather than left as a stale promise.

Trademarks and independence

Company and product names used across this site are trademarks of their respective owners and are used descriptively, because there is no way to report on whether a service is available without naming it. IsItDown.now is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any monitored company, and no monitored company has input into its own page here.