After Downdetector itself went down, someone made a Downdetector Downdetector, and then someone made a Downdetector Downdetector Downdetector, and then…

A person on a phone in the future — A Cyberpunk 2077 NPC who I'm assuming is checking a futuristic version of Downdetector on their phone. (Image credit: CDPR)

Downdetector is a simple website that tells you whether or not online services like Discord are functioning so that you can determine whether problems accessing them are on their end or on yours. A funny thing happened this week, though: During a big Cloudflare outage on Tuesday, Downdetector itself went down.

What do you do then? Gus Owen, creator of web game TimeGuessr (it's like GeoGuessr, but you're guessing both the location and year a photo was taken), had an idea: Make a Downdetector for Downdetector.

Someone quickly followed up Downdetector's Downdetector with Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector (downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com), which tells you whether or not Downdetector's Downdetector is down. That of course prompted someone else to post a link to Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector (downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com), which tells you whether Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector is up or down.

I'm happy to report that, at the time of writing, Downdetector, Downdetector's Downdetector, Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector, and Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector are all operating normally—though I can't be entirely sure about the last one, since there's no Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector telling me whether it's accessible across the world.

Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector. — (Image credit: halgir)

As one Hacker News poster pointed out, the maximum length of the part of a domain name between the dots (www.thispart.com) is 63 characters, so www.downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com cannot be registered because it exceeds the limit by exactly one character. Shame, but you could get rid of an 's' and make it work, or use a subdomain (downdetectors.downdetectors...).

According to Cloudflare, the outage that triggered this recursive gag wasn't caused by a malicious cyberattack, but was an accident caused by a mere change to a "database systems' permissions." You can read more about what happened on the Cloudflare blog—just try not to think too hard about how much our society's continued functioning relies on the internet not falling apart, despite its many possible points of failure. (At least we'll have many Downdetectors to detect when things are down.)

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Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.

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