Tell us your site is down before we notice
You know more about your own service than our probe ever will. Verify your domain and you can publish an operator notice that appears above our automated verdict on your status page - During an incident, during maintenance, or to correct us when we are wrong.
Prove it once
A DNS TXT record or a file at a well-known path. Takes a minute and never needs repeating.
One API call
POST a state and a sentence. No SDK, no dashboard to keep open, no account tier.
It expires
Every notice carries a lifetime, capped at 24 hours, so a forgotten one cannot linger.
How verification works
Why we verify at all
Verification is what separates an operator notice from an anonymous claim. Once a domain is yours, your notice appears above our own verdict on your service’s status page, and the same verified domain is what an API key is issued against. Our measurement never changes - the methodology explains why the two are kept apart.
The two ways to prove it
Two ways, either is enough. Both require real control of the domain, which is exactly the point - Without that, anyone could publish an outage notice under a competitor's name.
isitdown-verify=<your token>
on the domain itself or on _isitdown.<domain>
https://<domain>/isitdown-verify.txt
containing just the token - Or at /.well-known/isitdown-verify.txt if you prefer
Claim a domain below and you get its token immediately. Verification is checked on demand, so there is no waiting queue - Publish the record, press the button, done.
Sign in with Google to claim a domain. We need an accountable owner on record before letting anyone publish a notice under a company's name - That is the whole point of the verification.
Sign in with GooglePublishing a notice
One request. The key goes in an Authorization header, exactly like any other bearer token.
curl -X POST https://isitdown.now/api/v1/beacon \
-H "Authorization: Bearer idn_your_key_here" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"state": "maintenance",
"message": "Scheduled database upgrade. Back by 03:00 UTC.",
"expires_in": 7200
}'| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| state | up (operating normally), degraded (degraded performance), maintenance (planned maintenance), down (known outage), or clear to remove the notice |
| message | Up to 300 characters, shown verbatim. No links - Describe the problem instead. |
| expires_in | Seconds, 60 to 86400. Defaults to one hour. |
A GET to the same endpoint returns your current notice. Sixty signals an hour is plenty for an incident and stops a broken loop hammering us.
Wiring it into your own alerting
The natural place for this is wherever you already declare an incident.
If you use a status page provider, most can fire a webhook when you open an incident - Point it at a small handler that translates the payload into a beacon call. If you page people with Alertmanager or similar, add the call to the same receiver that notifies your on-call.
The pattern that works best is to publish down or degraded when you declare, and clear when you resolve. Because notices expire on their own, forgetting the second call is untidy rather than harmful.
Questions
What does an operator notice change on my status page?
A notice card appears above our automated verdict, attributed to you as the verified operator and stamped with the time you published it. Visitors see your account of the incident before our outside measurement.
Can I use it to hide an outage?
No. A notice is displayed alongside our measurements, never instead of them. It cannot change the recorded uptime figure and cannot close an incident our checks opened. If we can see your service is down, the page still says so.
My service is not in your directory. Can I still verify?
You can verify the domain and use the API, but a notice has nowhere to display until the service has a page here. Ask us and we will consider adding it.
What stops someone claiming a domain that is not theirs?
Verification requires a DNS TXT record or a file served from the domain itself, both of which need real control of it. An unverified claim can publish nothing at all.
What does it cost?
Nothing, and there is no tier that does. We would rather have accurate information on the page than charge for the privilege of supplying it.
Our crawler
If you would rather we checked a lightweight health endpoint than your home page, or not at all, that is all documented.
About IsItDownNowBot