How to use Downdetector to see when top sites like Facebook and Instagram go down
Topics: Technology, Social Media
Thomas Bamford
Featured Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Topics: Technology, Social Media
If Facebook has ever gone blank on you mid-scroll and you've spent ten minutes turning your router off and on again before realising the whole platform was down, Downdetector is the tool you need bookmarked right now.
Downdetector is a free, real-time service that tracks outages across more than 34,000 apps, websites, and services in 72 countries.
It works by collecting problem reports from users and monitoring online activity to identify patterns that suggest something has gone wrong at a platform's end, not yours. Hundreds of millions of people use it, and it processes tens of millions of problem reports every single month.
Head to Downdetector.com and type the name of whatever service you are having trouble with into the search bar: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, your broadband provider, Netflix, whatever it might be. The results page will show you one of three statuses: no problems, possible problems, or problems detected.
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These statuses are not just based on raw numbers of complaints.
Downdetector calculates a baseline for each service it monitors, built from the average volume of reports for that specific time of day over the previous six months.
It only flags an incident when reports are significantly above that normal level, so a handful of people moaning does not automatically trigger an alert.
The status updates every four minutes, keeping the picture as current as possible.
Once you are on a service's page, you can dig deeper. There is a 24-hour chart showing report volumes across the day, a breakdown of the most commonly reported problems, such as login failures, server connection issues, or a total blackout, and a live outage map showing where in the world the issues are being reported.
That last feature is particularly useful for working out whether a problem is global, limited to a specific country, or confined to your local area.
If you are experiencing issues and want to help other users, you can submit your own report directly on the relevant service page.
Hit the report button, select the type of issue you are dealing with from the provided list, and your location will be automatically factored in.
Downdetector uses your actual location when logging reports, so even if you are abroad when something goes wrong at home, your report will count in the right place.
It is worth knowing that repeated reports from the same user are limited in how much they contribute to the public totals, which helps keep the data clean and prevents individual users from inflating the numbers.
For anyone who wants to stay ahead of outages rather than just react to them, Downdetector also lets you check the history of past incidents for any given service, handy for spotting whether a platform has a pattern of going down at certain times.
Push notifications are also available through the Speedtest app, letting you set alerts for up to three services so you are the first to know when something drops.