Downdetector vs API Status Check: Which Service Do You Need?
When your application depends on third-party APIs, knowing about outages quickly can mean the difference between minutes of downtime and hours of lost revenue. But should you rely on Downdetector's crowdsourced reports, implement dedicated API monitoring, or use both?
This comprehensive comparison examines two fundamentally different approaches to outage detection: Downdetector's crowdsourced, user-reported model versus API Status Check's direct endpoint testing. We'll explore what each excels at, where they fall short, and—most importantly—help you determine which solution (or combination) best fits your needs.
Understanding Downdetector: The Power of the Crowd
What Downdetector Actually Does
Downdetector, owned by Ookla (the company behind Speedtest), has become the internet's de facto source for real-time outage information. Operating across 64 countries in 26 languages, the platform monitors over 25,000 services and engages more than 20 million monthly active users.
The core mechanism is elegantly simple: when users experience service disruptions, they report them. Downdetector's systems analyze these reports in real-time, using anomaly detection algorithms to identify when report volumes spike "significantly higher than baseline." Once the threshold is crossed, Downdetector flags an outage and displays it publicly.
But there's more sophistication under the hood than you might expect. Downdetector doesn't just collect reports—it also:
- Monitors social media platforms for outage-related chatter
- Uses AI-powered situation reports to automatically analyze and summarize incident details
- Identifies patterns and correlations across different services
- Provides geographic heatmaps showing where issues are concentrated
- Tracks downstream and upstream dependencies to identify root causes
Downdetector's Real Strength: Early Warning at Scale
Downdetector's crowdsourced approach shines in several specific scenarios, often detecting problems that internal monitoring tools completely miss.
The AT&T Outage Example
On February 22, 2024, millions of AT&T customers woke up to find their phones had no signal. Downdetector logged almost 2 million unique user reports, flagging the nationwide issue within the first few hours. Meanwhile, it took AT&T approximately 16 hours to make a public announcement confirming the internal cause.
Downdetector's data revealed something internal monitoring couldn't: a significant disparity between AT&T and its competitors. While Verizon and T-Mobile saw increased reports, their volumes were substantially lower—many were actually "sympathetic" reports from users who couldn't reach AT&T customers and mistakenly thought their own service was down.
The PlayStation Network Outage
When Sony's PlayStation Network experienced a major outage on February 7, 2025, the incident generated over 3 million reports during a 24-hour period, peaking at more than 300,000 reports per hour.
What made this particularly challenging was determining the source: Was it PlayStation Network itself? A specific game? A game publisher? External cloud infrastructure?
By analyzing report patterns—much higher volumes for PSN versus individual games, significantly higher than competing platforms like Xbox, and multiple game publishers affected simultaneously—Downdetector's data strongly indicated an internal PSN issue, not a problem with AWS or other upstream services.
Downdetector Explorer: The Enterprise Version
While most people know Downdetector's free consumer-facing website, fewer are aware of Downdetector Explorer, the commercial platform designed for enterprises.
Explorer offers capabilities that the public site doesn't:
- Comprehensive notifications and alerts when your services experience issues
- Granular data access to understand incident patterns
- AI-powered insights that automatically summarize situations
- Integrations with observability systems like Datadog, Opsgenie, and Slack
- Incident attribution to identify whether outages are internal, downstream, or upstream
- Geographic and provider analysis to pinpoint localized issues
Explorer customers can also monitor their competitors' outages and understand ecosystem-wide disruptions that might affect their users even when their own systems are functioning perfectly.
Where Downdetector Has Limitations
For all its strengths, Downdetector's crowdsourced model has inherent constraints:
1. Reactive, Not Proactive
Downdetector can only flag an outage after enough users experience problems and report them. There's an inevitable delay—typically 5-15 minutes—between when an API starts failing and when Downdetector confirms an outage. For an API serving thousands of requests per minute, that delay translates to thousands of failed operations.
2. Consumer Service Focus
Downdetector's coverage is weighted toward consumer-facing applications: Instagram, Netflix, PlayStation Network, major banks, and ISPs. While it does cover some developer services (AWS, Stripe, GitHub), the reporting mechanism assumes human users will notice problems and submit reports.
Many APIs, however, fail silently. If your backend integration with a payment processor starts returning 500 errors, your users might see a generic error message—they're unlikely to think "I should report this to Downdetector."
3. No Developer Tooling
Downdetector provides no API, no webhooks, no status badges, and no programmatic access (except through Explorer's enterprise integrations). For developers who want to check API status before making calls, trigger automated failovers, or embed real-time status in dashboards, Downdetector isn't designed for that workflow.
4. Signal vs. Noise Challenges
Crowdsourcing introduces false positives. A localized ISP issue in one region can generate hundreds of reports that look like a service-wide outage. Users might report problems with a service when the actual issue is their own internet connection, their device, or a local network problem.
Downdetector uses sophisticated algorithms to filter noise, but the fundamental challenge remains: you're relying on non-technical users to accurately diagnose what's failing.
API Status Check: Direct Testing for Developers
A Different Problem, A Different Solution
API Status Check takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of waiting for users to report problems, it actively tests API endpoints every 5 minutes.
This proactive model addresses a specific pain point for developers: you're building an application that depends on third-party APIs (Stripe for payments, OpenAI for AI features, Twilio for SMS, AWS for infrastructure), and you need to know when those APIs fail—ideally before your users do.
What API Status Check Actually Monitors
While Downdetector monitors 25,000+ services, API Status Check focuses on 120+ critical APIs that developers actually integrate with:
- Payment processors: Stripe, PayPal, Square
- AI services: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI
- Cloud infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Vercel
- Communication: Twilio, SendGrid, Mailgun
- Developer platforms: GitHub, GitLab, npm
- Social platforms: Instagram, Discord, WhatsApp (API endpoints, not consumer apps)
- Databases: MongoDB Atlas, Supabase, PlanetScale
The key difference: API Status Check tests the actual API endpoints developers call, not just whether the marketing website is accessible. If api.stripe.com returns a 503 while stripe.com loads fine, API Status Check catches it.
Speed: The 10-15 Minute Advantage
Let's compare timelines for a typical outage:
Downdetector Timeline:
12:00 PM: Stripe API starts failing
12:05 PM: First users notice checkout isn't working and report to Downdetector
12:10 PM: 50 reports submitted (below threshold)
12:15 PM: 200+ reports trigger outage confirmation
12:16 PM: You check Downdetector and see the outage
API Status Check Timeline:
12:00 PM: Stripe API starts failing
12:03 PM: API Status Check's next scheduled test fails
12:03 PM: Alert sent to Slack/Discord/Email
12:04 PM: You're investigating and enabling PayPal fallback
That 10-15 minute difference is critical when you're processing hundreds or thousands of transactions per hour. Finding out about an API failure 15 minutes earlier might mean:
- 500 fewer failed payment attempts
- $10,000 in revenue that didn't slip through the cracks
- A much smaller spike in support tickets
- Users who never knew there was a problem
Developer-First Features
API Status Check is built for the way developers actually work:
1. Status Badges
Embed real-time status in your documentation, README files, or internal dashboards:
2. REST API for Programmatic Checks
Before processing a critical operation, check if the API is healthy:
const checkStripe = await fetch('https://apistatuscheck.com/api/stripe');
if (checkStripe.status === 'down') {
// Use PayPal fallback
return processWithPayPal(payment);
}
return processWithStripe(payment);
3. Webhooks for Automated Responses
Configure webhooks to trigger automated failover, alert on-call engineers, or update your own status page:
POST https://your-app.com/api/outage-webhook
{
"api": "stripe",
"status": "down",
"timestamp": "2026-02-11T15:30:00Z",
"details": "HTTP 503 - Service Unavailable"
}
4. Multi-Channel Alerts
Get notified instantly through your preferred channels:
- Slack: Posts in your #incidents channel
- Discord: Sends webhook notifications
- Email: Direct alerts with incident details
- Custom webhooks: Integrate with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or your own systems
What API Status Check Doesn't Do
API Status Check solves a specific problem for a specific audience, which means intentional trade-offs:
1. Limited Coverage
Monitoring 120 APIs is nowhere near Downdetector's 25,000 services. If you need to check whether Cox Cable is down in Phoenix or if PlayStation Network is having issues, API Status Check won't help.
2. No Consumer Service Focus
API Status Check doesn't monitor Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, or most consumer apps. It's laser-focused on services developers integrate with programmatically.
3. No Geographic Outage Mapping
Downdetector shows you that "Stripe is down in Texas but working in California." API Status Check currently tests from centralized locations and reports binary up/down status. (This is a planned future enhancement.)
4. No Crowdsourced Context
When Downdetector flags an outage, you can read hundreds of user comments describing what they're experiencing, often revealing useful patterns. API Status Check gives you the raw technical status: HTTP response code, response time, error message.
Downdetector vs API Monitoring: Solving Different Problems
The key insight is this: Downdetector and API Status Check aren't really competitors. They solve fundamentally different problems for different audiences.
Problem 1: "Is This Service Down Right Now?"
Who asks this: General users, IT support teams, operations staff
Best solution: Downdetector
When Instagram won't load, Netflix keeps buffering, or your bank's mobile app crashes, you want to know if it's a widespread issue or just you. Downdetector excels at this: one glance at the chart tells you thousands of other people are having the same problem.
The crowdsourced model is perfect here because:
- You need breadth (25,000 services) more than depth
- Geographic patterns matter (is this regional or nationwide?)
- Seeing others' experiences validates your issue
- You're checking manually, not programmatically
Problem 2: "Monitor My Critical APIs and Alert Me When They Fail"
Who asks this: Developers, DevOps engineers, SRE teams
Best solution: API Status Check
When you've built a SaaS product that depends on Stripe for billing, OpenAI for AI features, and AWS for hosting, you can't afford to wait for users to report issues. You need proactive monitoring with instant alerts.
The direct-testing model is better here because:
- Speed matters (10-15 minute advantage)
- You need programmatic access (API, webhooks, badges)
- False positives are costly (crowdsourced data is noisier)
- You want to test actual API endpoints, not marketing sites
Use Case Scenarios: Which Tool When?
Scenario 1: E-commerce Site Using Stripe
Your situation: You process $50,000 in daily transactions through Stripe. If Stripe goes down during peak hours, you're losing $100/minute.
Downdetector approach:
- Stripe API fails
- Users see checkout errors
- Some users report to Downdetector
- 15 minutes later, enough reports trigger outage confirmation
- You see Downdetector alert and investigate
- You manually enable PayPal fallback
- Total response time: 20 minutes
- Lost revenue: ~$2,000
API Status Check approach:
- Stripe API fails
- API Status Check detects failure in next monitoring cycle (≤5 minutes)
- Slack alert fires immediately
- Engineer enables PayPal failover
- Total response time: 7 minutes
- Lost revenue: ~$700
Or, the automated approach:
- Stripe API fails
- API Status Check webhook triggers
- Your application automatically switches to PayPal
- Total response time: <1 minute
- Lost revenue: ~$100
Best tool: API Status Check (with automated failover)
Scenario 2: Consumer Checking if Instagram Is Down
Your situation: Instagram won't load. You want to know if it's you or them.
Downdetector approach:
- Open Downdetector.com
- Search for Instagram
- See 15,000 reports in the last 15 minutes
- Check heatmap—nationwide issue
- Read comments—everyone has the same problem
- Time: 30 seconds
- Outcome: Confirmed it's not just you
API Status Check approach:
- Open apistatuscheck.com
- Find Instagram in the list
- See status: Down
- Time: 30 seconds
- Outcome: Confirmed it's down, but less context
Best tool: Downdetector (crowdsourced context is valuable here)
Scenario 3: SaaS Startup Depending on 10+ APIs
Your situation: Your product integrates with Stripe, OpenAI, Twilio, SendGrid, AWS S3, GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase. When any of these fails, features break.
Downdetector approach:
- Manually check 10 different Downdetector pages daily (impractical)
- Wait for users to report issues (reactive)
- No way to automate monitoring or failover
- Time investment: 15 minutes/day
- Result: Still reactive, manual, error-prone
API Status Check approach:
- One dashboard shows all 10 APIs
- Slack alerts when any API fails
- Webhooks trigger automated responses
- Status badges embedded in docs
- Time investment: 5 minutes for initial setup
- Result: Proactive, automated, reliable
Best tool: API Status Check
Scenario 4: Operations Team at Enterprise Company
Your situation: You're responsible for a large e-commerce platform with millions of users. You need to understand ecosystem-wide outages—not just your dependencies, but also ISP issues, CDN problems, and third-party service disruptions that might affect your customers.
Downdetector Explorer approach:
- Monitor outages across thousands of services
- Get alerts when your services are reported down
- See geographic patterns (which ISPs are affected?)
- Identify whether issues are internal, upstream (CDN, cloud), or downstream (ISPs)
- Compare your outage rates to competitors
- Outcome: Comprehensive ecosystem visibility
API Status Check approach:
- Monitor your critical API dependencies
- Get instant alerts for API failures
- Automate failovers and incident responses
- Outcome: Fast, precise API monitoring
Best tool: Both
- Downdetector Explorer for ecosystem awareness and incident investigation
- API Status Check for proactive API monitoring and automated responses
Scenario 5: Developer Troubleshooting Integration Issue
Your situation: Your Twilio SMS integration stopped working 30 minutes ago. Is it Twilio, or is it your code?
Downdetector approach:
- Check Downdetector for Twilio
- See 50 reports (below threshold, no confirmed outage)
- Uncertain—is it a small outage or just you?
- Spend 20 minutes debugging your code
- Turns out Twilio had a brief regional issue
- Time wasted: 30 minutes
API Status Check approach:
- Check API Status Check for Twilio
- See status: "Degraded - Elevated error rates"
- Immediately know it's not your code
- Wait 10 minutes for Twilio to fix it
- Time saved: 20 minutes
Best tool: API Status Check (faster signal for API-specific issues)
Pricing: What Do They Cost?
Downdetector
Consumer site (downdetector.com):
- Free for everyone
- Revenue model: Advertising
Downdetector Explorer (Enterprise):
- Contact sales for pricing
- Typical customers: Major service providers, ISPs, telcos, large enterprises
- Includes: API access, alerts, integrations, AI insights, white-label options
API Status Check
Current offering:
- Free - Full access to monitoring for 120+ APIs
- Alerts - Slack, Discord, Email notifications included
- Developer tools - API, webhooks, status badges included
Future premium tiers (planned):
- Professional (~$29/month): Custom API monitoring, advanced alerts, SLA reports
- Team (~$99/month): Team collaboration, multiple projects, priority support
- Enterprise (custom pricing): White-label, dedicated infrastructure, custom SLAs
The Developer Perspective: Why API Monitoring Matters
If you're a developer reading this, here's why dedicated API monitoring is worth considering even if you use Downdetector:
1. APIs Fail Silently
When Instagram goes down, millions of users notice instantly and flood Downdetector with reports. When your integration with a B2B payment API starts returning 500 errors, your users might just see "Payment failed—please try again." They don't know it's a third-party API issue, so they don't report it to Downdetector.
By the time enough people report a problem to trigger Downdetector's algorithms, you've already lost significant revenue or user trust.
2. Speed Compounds
A 10-minute detection advantage doesn't sound like much, but consider:
- At 1,000 requests/minute, that's 10,000 potentially failed operations
- At $5 average transaction value, that's $50,000 in revenue at risk
- At 20% support ticket rate, that's 2,000 tickets you prevented
- At $15 average support cost, that's $30,000 in support costs avoided
The ROI of faster detection is often measured in thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per incident.
3. Automation Requires Programmatic Access
The most valuable part of API monitoring isn't just knowing about outages—it's automatically responding to them:
- Switching from Stripe to PayPal when payment processing fails
- Falling back from OpenAI to Anthropic when AI APIs are down
- Routing traffic from one CDN to another when primary CDN degrades
- Updating your status page automatically when dependencies fail
None of this is possible with Downdetector's consumer-focused interface. You need APIs, webhooks, and machine-readable status data.
4. Context Matters
When Downdetector shows "Stripe: 5,000 reports," what does that tell you?
- Is it a total outage or degraded performance?
- Is it affecting API calls or just the dashboard?
- Is it specific to card processing, ACH, or everything?
- What's the actual HTTP status code and error message?
API-focused monitoring gives you technical context: "HTTP 503, upstream connect error, 95% of requests failing." That's actionable information.
Can You Use Both? (Yes, and Here's How)
Many development teams use both tools for different purposes:
Use Downdetector for:
- Confirming widespread, consumer-facing outages
- Understanding if issues are industry-wide (multiple services down)
- Checking ecosystem health (ISPs, CDNs, cloud providers)
- Investigating geographic patterns
- Reading user reports for qualitative context
Use API Status Check for:
- Proactive monitoring of your critical API dependencies
- Instant alerts via Slack/Discord when APIs fail
- Automated failover and incident response
- Status badges in documentation
- Programmatic status checks before API calls
Example workflow:
- API Status Check alerts you: "OpenAI API is down"
- You check Downdetector to see if it's widespread
- Downdetector confirms: 10,000 reports, nationwide outage
- You switch to Anthropic as a temporary fallback (automated via webhook)
- You update your status page: "AI features running on backup provider due to OpenAI outage"
- When API Status Check shows OpenAI is back up, you switch back
Both tools are free (or freemium), so there's no cost to using both. The combination gives you:
- Speed and automation (API Status Check)
- Ecosystem context and geographic patterns (Downdetector)
Alternatives: Other Tools in This Space
Neither Downdetector nor API Status Check might fit your needs. Here are alternatives:
For Custom API/Infrastructure Monitoring
Datadog - Enterprise APM and infrastructure monitoring with custom API checks, traces, logs, and alerts. Expensive but comprehensive.
New Relic - Full-stack observability with 100GB/month free tier. Good for monitoring your own services and custom API integrations.
Pingdom - Uptime monitoring for websites and APIs. Owned by SolarWinds. Focuses on HTTP/HTTPS endpoint monitoring.
UptimeRobot - Popular free tier (50 monitors), simple uptime checks every 5 minutes. Good for small teams monitoring custom APIs.
For Status Pages
StatusPage.io - Industry standard for creating your own status page. Owned by Atlassian. If you want to communicate your service status to customers, this is it.
Instatus - Modern status page alternative, cheaper than StatusPage.
Better Stack - Combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, and status pages in one platform.
For Specific Ecosystems
AWS CloudWatch - For monitoring AWS services specifically Vercel Analytics - For monitoring Vercel deployments GitHub Status - For GitHub-specific service status
Key Takeaways
Downdetector is best for:
- ✅ Broad ecosystem awareness (25,000 services across 64 countries)
- ✅ Consumer-facing services and applications
- ✅ Geographic outage patterns and heatmaps
- ✅ Crowdsourced context and user reports
- ✅ Confirming widespread outages
- ❌ NOT ideal for: Proactive API monitoring, developer automation, instant alerts
API Status Check is best for:
- ✅ Proactive monitoring of critical APIs (120+ services)
- ✅ Fast detection (5-15 minute advantage over crowdsourced reporting)
- ✅ Developer integrations (webhooks, API, status badges)
- ✅ Automated responses and failover
- ✅ Testing actual API endpoints, not consumer websites
- ❌ NOT ideal for: Consumer service status, geographic outage mapping, ecosystem-wide visibility
The real answer for most development teams:
Use both, because they solve different problems:
- API Status Check for proactive monitoring, instant alerts, and automated responses
- Downdetector for ecosystem context, geographic patterns, and confirming widespread issues
Neither replaces the other—they're complementary tools that, together, give you comprehensive visibility into your dependencies and the broader service ecosystem.
Ready to start monitoring your critical APIs?
👉 Try API Status Check - Free real-time monitoring for 120+ APIs with instant Slack/Discord/Email alerts.
🔍 Check Downdetector - See real-time outage reports for thousands of services worldwide.
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