Downdetector knocked out by Cloudflare outage—just when people needed it most
On November 18, 2024, Downdetector—the go-to site for checking if your favorite apps are down—went offline itself thanks to a major Cloudflare meltdown.
People trying to see what was broken online were met with error messages instead of updates, leaving everyone in the dark about outages as they happened.
Why did this happen?
Downdetector depends on Cloudflare to keep its site running smoothly and filter out bots.
But when Cloudflare's own systems glitched out, Downdetector couldn't verify real users and basically shut its doors, showing only blank pages during one of the internet's busiest disruption days.
Back online (and why it matters)
Once Cloudflare restored partial functionality, Downdetector gradually became accessible again and users could finally track which services were struggling.
This whole episode is a reminder: even the tools we trust to spot internet problems can get caught up in bigger tech failures.