"Downdetector" is kind of a genius scam. It "detects" outages by counting hits for the service on its own page. If lots of people are checking, it just assumes that it's down.<p>It doesn't really "detect" anything.
Welcome to the future. Here in Israel, I have seen multiple instances over the years of either the McDonald's ordering panels being down, the McDonald's website being down, or both. When the panels are down, only the website/app can be used to order food. When both are down, no food can be ordered, and you'll see the employees standing idly in the kitchen, twiddling their thumbs, unable to do anything.
While this is a rather trivial event considering that few people need MacDonalds, this is a perfect example of how fragile modern society is. Everywhere, we are building a world that is fragile due to its incredible high-tech dependencies: we've got opaque technologies, global supply chains, and most disturbing of all on many fronts, the dependence on unsustainable and unenvironmental mining and fossil fuels (see [1] for an example of our increasing dependence).<p>No one really knows how it works any more and it's the apotheosis of ugliness. We should embark on an effort to simplify dependencies and remove unnecessary technology from our life, rather than complicate it with more for the sake of useless economic growth. Because when it comes crashing down, and it will, it's going to be ugly. (Before you reply or downvote, just ask yourself, how robust can a system really be if virtually all its innovations succeed or fail based on short-term profits in a brutal capitalistic world.)<p>[1] <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-production">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-productio...</a>