https://statusdetector.com/blog Plain-English explainers on how the internet actually breaks. en-us https://statusdetector.com/blog/before-reporting-outage https://statusdetector.com/blog/before-reporting-outage Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The five-minute checklist that turns a frustrated 'X is broken' into a useful report. Five steps before you open a support ticket — most of them resolve the issue, and the rest give you the evidence the support team actually needs. StatusDetector Troubleshooting Guide Reporting https://statusdetector.com/blog/cdn-dns-cloud-outages-cascade https://statusdetector.com/blog/cdn-dns-cloud-outages-cascade Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Apps you use daily share fewer pieces of infrastructure than you'd think. When one of those pieces fails — a single CDN, a single DNS provider, a single AWS region — half the internet seems to break at once. Here's why, with the canonical examples and what you can do about it. StatusDetector Infrastructure CDN DNS Cloud Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/dependency-status-dashboard https://statusdetector.com/blog/dependency-status-dashboard Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every team eventually needs an internal page that shows which of their third-party dependencies are healthy right now. Here's the minimum viable version — what to monitor, what to skip, and where the simple approach breaks down. StatusDetector Engineering Guide Status pages https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-vs-ssl-vs-http-errors https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-vs-ssl-vs-http-errors Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A broken page can fail at any of four layers — DNS, TCP, TLS, or HTTP. The error message you see almost never names the layer, but the layer is the entire answer. Here's how to tell them apart in under a minute. StatusDetector Debugging DNS SSL HTTP Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/how-to-check-major-services https://statusdetector.com/blog/how-to-check-major-services Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Each of the big four has a status page, but each one tells a different story. The trick is knowing which signal is fast, which is slow, and which is hiding the actual incident. A field guide for each. StatusDetector Troubleshooting Guide Status pages https://statusdetector.com/blog/regional-outages https://statusdetector.com/blog/regional-outages Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The same URL can return 200 OK in Frankfurt and time out in Mumbai. Four mechanisms explain almost every regional outage — GeoDNS, CDN POP failures, BGP routing problems, and government-level filtering. Here's how to tell which one is in play. StatusDetector Debugging DNS CDN BGP Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/cloudflare-error-codes-decoded https://statusdetector.com/blog/cloudflare-error-codes-decoded Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Cloudflare error pages own their own numeric range — 5xx for upstream problems, 1xxx for client-side policy hits. Each code points at a specific failure in a specific place. Here's the field guide. StatusDetector HTTP CDN Guide Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/connection-refused-vs-reset-vs-timeout https://statusdetector.com/blog/connection-refused-vs-reset-vs-timeout Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Three error phrases that look similar but point at completely different failures. One means the server doesn't exist; one means it killed your conversation mid-sentence; one means it ghosted you. Here's how to tell them apart and what each tells you to do. StatusDetector Networking Debugging Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/lying-status-pages https://statusdetector.com/blog/lying-status-pages Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT You're staring at error 503s. You open the vendor's status page. All systems operational. You aren't crazy and the page isn't lying — it's lagging, and the lag is structural. Here's the anatomy of the gap, and what to look at instead. StatusDetector Status pages Debugging Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/status-page-indicators-decoded https://statusdetector.com/blog/status-page-indicators-decoded Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every public status page reports the same five-state vocabulary: operational, minor, major, critical, maintenance. Vendors use them differently. Here's what each label is actually trying to tell you — and the edge cases where the label lies. StatusDetector Status pages Guide Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/429-rate-limits https://statusdetector.com/blog/429-rate-limits Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Most rate-limit explanations stop at 'you went too fast.' That's true but not useful. Real rate limiters work in five different ways — token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed window, sliding window, concurrency cap — and the headers tell you which one you're hitting, when to retry, and how much budget you have left. StatusDetector HTTP Rate Limiting Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-ttl-math https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-ttl-math Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT 'DNS propagation' has nothing to do with how long it takes. There is no single timer. There are five separate caches between your registrar and your visitors' resolvers — and you need to understand all of them to predict the answer to 'when will the new record be live?' StatusDetector DNS Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/domain-lifecycle-epp-codes https://statusdetector.com/blog/domain-lifecycle-epp-codes Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Domains do not simply go from 'active' to 'gone'. They pass through a precisely-defined sequence of states — most invisible to the owner until something breaks. Here is the full lifecycle, the EPP codes that mark each step, and exactly how long you have to react at every point. StatusDetector Domains DNS Explainer https://statusdetector.com/blog/google-killing-field https://statusdetector.com/blog/google-killing-field Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Reader, Wave, Buzz, Inbox, Allo, Stadia, Domains, Jamboard. Google has shipped — and quietly killed — a staggering number of consumer products. Looking at the pattern reveals which signals to read before you invest in any cloud-only tool. StatusDetector Shutdowns Google Internet Graveyard https://statusdetector.com/blog/permanently-shut-down-vs-down https://statusdetector.com/blog/permanently-shut-down-vs-down Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A site won't load. Is it a five-minute hiccup, an outage that ends today, or has the service quietly been dead for two years? The diagnostic isn't intuition — it's six concrete signals, in priority order. Here is the workflow we run. StatusDetector Shutdowns Debugging Internet Graveyard https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-ssl-certificate-errors https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-ssl-certificate-errors Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID. ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH. The browser tells you almost exactly what's wrong if you know how to read it. Here is what each one means, why it happens, and what to do. StatusDetector SSL HTTP Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/service-shutdown-data-fate https://statusdetector.com/blog/service-shutdown-data-fate Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Pocket, Skype, Stadia, and Google Reader followed wildly different playbooks. Some refunded everything. Some preserved data for years in an archive. Some closed the export window before users noticed. The patterns are surprisingly consistent — and predict what to do *before* the announcement. StatusDetector Shutdowns Data Portability Internet Graveyard https://statusdetector.com/blog/the-5xx-family https://statusdetector.com/blog/the-5xx-family Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every 5xx code is a server's way of saying 'something went wrong on our end.' But they are not interchangeable. 502 means upstream; 504 means upstream-but-slow; 503 means deliberately unavailable; 520 means Cloudflare-doesn't-know. Knowing which one you got cuts the bug-hunt by more than half. StatusDetector HTTP Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-propagation-explained https://statusdetector.com/blog/dns-propagation-explained Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT The phrase 'DNS propagation' is misleading. There's no synchronous global update. What you're actually waiting for is a million independent caches to expire — and that timing depends on choices made by you, your registrar, and every resolver in between. StatusDetector DNS Explainer https://statusdetector.com/blog/is-it-down-for-everyone https://statusdetector.com/blog/is-it-down-for-everyone Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Most people skip the diagnostic step and jump straight to restarting their router. A clean three-way split — third-party probe, official status page, network isolation — resolves almost every 'is it down' question in five minutes. StatusDetector Troubleshooting Guide https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-redirect-chains https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-redirect-chains Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT When 'is the site down' turns out to be 'the site is fine, but the redirect chain is sending users somewhere unexpected,' the only useful diagnostic is the full hop-by-hop trail. Here's what each step tells you, and the patterns that crop up most often. StatusDetector HTTP Debugging https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-http-status-codes https://statusdetector.com/blog/reading-http-status-codes Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Six HTTP status codes do most of the diagnostic work on a broken-website page. The class digit tells you whose fault it is; the second and third digits tell you which part broke. Here's what each one is really saying — and what to do about it. StatusDetector HTTP Guide Debugging