Reddit is experiencing a nationwide outage that has taken down the app and website. Thousands of users have reported error messages and comments disappearing from the site.
Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything’s fine? What’s the point of the status site if it doesn’t actually acknowledge that there’s any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?
the route/connection between the monitoring and you is OK; between the company and the monitoring is OK; but between you and the company is not OK – this means that, so far as the monitoring can tell, the site is up.
The status checks run at some interval and you’re hitting it before that interval
There’s some threshold of errors that needs to happen first so tiny hiccups don’t register as full-blown outages.
the monitoring/metrics are poorly-designed
There are probably other cases. I don’t know the architecture in this case, so I won’t speculate at any others.
Yeah, I thought of that a few minutes later and was too lazy to edit. I also thought maybe it’s semi-auto and someone needs to verify it manually before allowing the UI to show
You mean redditstatus.com? Might be linked to internal ticket portals.
If you ask because of the domain, it might be to be resilient if theres an issue with the TLD of the company e.g. status.example.com vs status-example.com
At one of the tech companies I worked at, “uptime” was one of the primary metrics that was advertised to customers. There was never a written policy, but management HIGHLY discouraged updating the outage dashboard unless the world was literally on fire, because it made their vanity metric look bad in advertisements.
…yes that’s as dumb as you think it is, but it’s quite common in the tech industry.
Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything’s fine? What’s the point of the status site if it doesn’t actually acknowledge that there’s any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?
There are a few options off the top off my head
There are probably other cases. I don’t know the architecture in this case, so I won’t speculate at any others.
Maybe it’s not automated and whoever is responsible isn’t awake yet.
Yeah, I thought of that a few minutes later and was too lazy to edit. I also thought maybe it’s semi-auto and someone needs to verify it manually before allowing the UI to show
You mean redditstatus.com? Might be linked to internal ticket portals.
If you ask because of the domain, it might be to be resilient if theres an issue with the TLD of the company e.g. status.example.com vs status-example.com
At one of the tech companies I worked at, “uptime” was one of the primary metrics that was advertised to customers. There was never a written policy, but management HIGHLY discouraged updating the outage dashboard unless the world was literally on fire, because it made their vanity metric look bad in advertisements.
…yes that’s as dumb as you think it is, but it’s quite common in the tech industry.