The problem with downdetector is that people say something is down when really it's another service. Like with Cloudflare, a lot of the comments are simply that a website was down giving an CF error, but in reality it was probably not CF that was down but an underlying service.
Agree on the CF part. I found it interesting that the downdetector page had other cloud-providers like Google and AWS showing error spikes at around the same time.
Marginally, if anything. Non-technical users misattribute and misunderstand causes of outages.
There’s a comment on the AWS page complaining that iTunes gift cards are being slow to arrive. The Google page has people who think the comments are the place to talk to Google support.
A major outage will make itself known in far clearer ways.
Sure, but that doesn't prove the claim that was made: that several sites are experiencing a DNS DDoS attack. Occam's razor here, with the proof presented, is that people are misattributing the Azure outage.
My broadband provider was down (Wave G) and had no status page. Social media was silent. The only way I could confirm it was an outage and not my local network setup was by using downdetector.
I wish those companies would actually have status pages.
