No, the graphs are highly misleading because they autoscale the y axis to the highest point and the they do very loose string matching to detect errors.
If you click through to something not on Google cloud, you see moderately elevated error rates (e.g., Instagram is up by 4x) but if you click through to something actually on Google, you see very highly elevated error rates (e.g., roughly 50000x for Snapchat).
If you read the "error reports", they actually report that Instagram isn't down (same for Twitter if you check Twitter). The error report detection seems to be just string matching. Here's an actual "error report" from downdetector that's the caused of allegedly elevated error rates:
> my twitter timeline: why isn’t snapchat working? anyone’s snapchat not working? snapchat’s being dumb. rip snapchat.
The Twitter "error report" is literally a report that Twitter isn't down.
it's no clearer on desktop. that's actually pretty funny that the instagram graph spikes just because people are complaining about snapchat being down.
i always thought downdetector was doing something a bit more clever than just reporting the rate of tweets containing the word "instagram" or "facebook" or something. but apparently not.
If you click through to something not on Google cloud, you see moderately elevated error rates (e.g., Instagram is up by 4x) but if you click through to something actually on Google, you see very highly elevated error rates (e.g., roughly 50000x for Snapchat).
If you read the "error reports", they actually report that Instagram isn't down (same for Twitter if you check Twitter). The error report detection seems to be just string matching. Here's an actual "error report" from downdetector that's the caused of allegedly elevated error rates:
> my twitter timeline: why isn’t snapchat working? anyone’s snapchat not working? snapchat’s being dumb. rip snapchat.
The Twitter "error report" is literally a report that Twitter isn't down.