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

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.

Downdetector’s Downdetector, as Owen called it, tells you whether or not Downdetector is down. Its functionality has been called into question, but the satirical website was nevertheless a hit on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum, leading to some good old fashioned internet goofing off.

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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.

(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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