You're on that site right now!

HN is the true down detector - if HN is down TCP is down.

I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.

haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.

> Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Arbites.

"To serve the Emperor. To protect His domains. To judge and stand guard over His subjects. To carry the Emperor's law to all worlds under His blessed protection. To pursue and punish those who trespassed against His word."

i love you guys.

Can down detector not detect whether down detector detector is down or not?

Maybe distributed down detection?

I know there are people here perfectly capable of running with that idea and we might just see a distributed down detector announced on HN :)

See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1 so they all go down together anyway

pervs.

Time for the META Down Detector - detecting which of the three is down

Or "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

I think the original down detectors do

Mutually assured down-detection.

It's detectors all the way down.

There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.

https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo