Downdetector® Methodology

How Downdetector collects, processes and aggregates problem reports to detect service issues and incidents

Downdetector is the world’s most popular platform for online service status information, attracting hundreds of millions of users who wish to understand the status of their internet connection, mobile network, online banking, gaming, entertainment and other online services. By analyzing tens of millions of monthly problem reports, Downdetector offers real-time status information for over 12,000 services across 47 websites representing 47 countries.

This page explains how Downdetector aggregates and analyzes this data to determine when a service provider’s customers are experiencing problems — and to alert both the company and community of possible issues.

What a Downdetector company status page tells you

Company status

Indicates if a large volume of users report there are no problems, possible problems or problems detected for a company

Downdetector Communicate

Enterprise users can communicate directly with their customers via their company’s page on Downdetector

Problem report button

Users can submit a problem report to Downdetector, choosing from a predefined list of problem indicators about what type of issue they’re experiencing

Problems last 24 hours

A daily historical view of problem reports compared to the baseline volume

Live outage map

Links to a live heatmap of problem reports

Most reported problems

Insight into user-submitted problem reports

Comments

Comments posted by the Downdetector community

How Downdetector collects status information and detects problems

Downdetector monitors and analyzes signals from its own websites, social media platforms and other sources around the web to automatically detect incidents and service disruptions.

Problem reports

Users can submit problem reports directly on a company status page on Downdetector, along with an indicator of the type of problem they are experiencing

Social media

Downdetector gathers data about the status of a service through Twitter and uses sentiment analysis to detect issues for a given company and location

Other sources

Downdetector also looks at other key indicators from across the web to determine if an extraordinary volume of users is having issues with a monitored company or service

How Downdetector determines if there’s an incident

A small number of users reporting a problem does not constitute a large-scale incident. To make sure that incidents are correctly represented, Downdetector calculates a baseline volume of typical problem reports for each service monitored, based on the average number of reports for that given time of day, measured over the previous year. Downdetector only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the baseline.

Downdetector only accepts the first report for a specific company from a single user. Subsequent information about the issue is collected, but is not counted as a new problem report.

Understanding Downdetector statuses

Based on the volume of problem reports compared to the baseline — and the duration of those report volumes — a monitored company will be shown in one of three statuses on the Downdetector website.

No problems

There is no evidence or weak evidence that the company is experiencing an incident

Possible problems

There is moderate evidence for a sufficient duration that the company may be experiencing an incident

Problems

There is strong evidence for a sufficient duration that that company is experiencing an incident

The incident detection system on the Downdetector consumer websites evaluates the status of each monitored company every four minutes.

How Downdetector geolocates problem reports

When a user submits a problem report on Downdetector, the report is attributed to the user’s location and country. If a user submits a report for a local service on a different country’s website, the problem report is attributed to that service for the user’s actual location. If the service is not monitored in that country, the information is collected and stored but not attributed as a report against the service for the other location.

Experiencing issues with a service?

Check the status of thousands of services and report when you’re experiencing an issue.

Enterprise monitoring solutions

Downdetector Enterprise™ provides early alerting on customer-reported service issues — often before internal monitoring tools can detect a problem.