who is going to throw $10 at

https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...

Had to check, but that is actually beyond what DNS allows. Labels (the part between dots) are limited to 63 characters. We could sneakily drop an s somewhere in there and then it would fit.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035

Also I think I triggered a nice error log in domaintools just now. https://whois.domaintools.com/downdetectorsdowndetectorsdown...

Have to use more efficient notation - downdetectorsx5.com

fix.downdetectors.com

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I keep coming back to check. :-)

Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?

It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(

It says down now correctly :D

4xDowndetector lol

The Internet is back!

It was worth the laugh, thanks!

Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.

From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph

Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.

It's a centralization vs decentralisation vs distributed system question.

Since down detectors serve to detect failures of centralized (and decentralized systems) the idea would be to at least get that right: a distributed system to detect outages.

You basically run detectors that heartbeat each others. Just a few suffice.

Once you start to see clusters of detectors go silent, you can assume things are falling apart, which is fine so long as a few remain.

Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.

It's down detectors all the way down

here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...

Looks like it's hosted in London?

We could create a linked list of these and just refer to the N’th one as N-down detector.