Ask HN: How do you report downtime?

#1

Post by reisr3 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 12:20 PM UTC

My company needs a highly reliable way to report downtime to our users. We've been using statuspage.io. The problem is that it seems to be dependent on AWS. So when the bi-monthly AWS outage takes our application down, we're not able to effectively report to our users!

Can anyone recommend a better solution?

Re: Ask HN: How do you report downtime?

#2

Post by warrenm » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

Some places use a dedicated Twitter account

There's also the ever-popular email or text path

To an extent, however, there's no foolproof/failproof way to accomplish what you're describing: phones could be down (of folks don't see the message), Twitter could be down, statuspage.io or AWS could be down...

Also - being "down" only matters if you're trying to use whatever is down while it's down: I don't care that you had an outage last night while I was asleep ... unless I do care

If you get it fixed fast enough, no one will care (though in-depth postmortems are great to read sometimes)

Re: Ask HN: How do you report downtime?

#3

Post by cpach » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

Put your status page on another provider? E.g. GCP, Fly.io, Digitalocean etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you report downtime?

#4

Post by atmosx » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

Did this actually happened? These kind of services are setup in multiple providers and regions to avoid specifically this problem.

If that is the case use another service that doesn’t depend on a single provider.

Re: Ask HN: How do you report downtime?

#5

Post by reisr3 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 6:38 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #4

Did this actually happened? These kind of services are setup in multiple providers and regions to avoid specifically this problem. If that is the case use another service that doesn’t depend on a single provider.

Yep. Statuspage.io goes down when Auth0 goes down, which goes down when AWS goes down.