Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloud Outage History: Six Years of Recurring Failures

Cloud infrastructure has never been more reliable in theory. In practice, the last six years of cloud outage history have delivered some of the most disruptive incidents on record. Not because cloud providers got worse, but because the systems built on top of them got larger, more interconnected, and more brittle in ways that don't show up until everything breaks at once.
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How to Reduce MTTR When Third-Party Services Go Down

Most MTTR guides assume the problem is in your infra. For modern apps, it's often not - it's Stripe, AWS, Auth0, or another vendor. Vendor status pages lie by omission. The lag between impact and acknowledgment can stretch to an hour or more. You need two runbooks, proactive vendor monitoring, and graceful degradation baked in before the 3 AM page hits. This post shows you exactly how.

April 2026: IsDown Users Saved 16.5 Hours with Early Outage Detection

In April 2026, IsDown's early detection system gave users a 3.6-hour head start on a major outage — plenty of time to implement workarounds before the vendor even acknowledged the problem. Across 45 early detections, our users saved a collective 16.5 hours by knowing about outages an average of 22 minutes before official status pages were updated.

AWS Outage History: What Engineering Teams Should Learn

If you've been running production workloads on AWS for more than a year, you've felt it: the 3 am PagerDuty alert, the scramble to check the AWS console, the frantic Slack thread asking, "Is this us or is this AWS?" And then, minutes or hours later, the AWS Service Health Dashboard finally acknowledges what your users have been experiencing all along. It happens because AWS is the backbone of modern infrastructure.
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How to Monitor AWS Status: Don't Wait for the Health Dashboard

The AWS Health Dashboard is slow, sometimes broken during major outages, and only tells you what AWS admits is broken. Real SREs layer three monitoring sources: AWS-native tools (CloudWatch, EventBridge), third-party aggregators (IsDown), and internal synthetic checks. Skip the vendor status page as your primary alert source.

March 2026: IsDown Users Saved 10.5 Hours with Early Outage Detection

In March 2026, IsDown users collectively saved 10.5 hours by receiving outage alerts before vendors officially acknowledged problems. The most significant early detection gave users a 2.3-hour head start when The Federal Reserve's FedACH system experienced issues. This data reveals the persistent gap between when users experience problems and when vendors update their status pages.

Multi-Language Status Page Widgets: Customize Widget Messages in Any Language

If your product serves users in multiple regions, your status page widget shouldn't be stuck in English. A customer in São Paulo seeing "All Systems Operational" when they expect "Todos os Sistemas Operacionais" is a small friction, but small frictions compound. It signals that their language isn't a priority, and it adds cognitive load during the exact moment they're checking whether something is broken. Until now, IsDown widgets shipped with hardcoded English messages. That's changed.

AI Systems Status Report - February 2026

This report covers the operational status of major AI systems during February 2026, including Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Groq Cloud, OpenAI, Perplexity, Replicate, and xAI. The data includes official incidents reported on vendor status pages and unconfirmed incidents detected through IsDown's monitoring systems.
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Build vs Buy Monitoring: The Real Cost Breakdown for IT Teams

Every IT team eventually faces this question: should we build our own monitoring system or buy an existing solution? On the surface, building seems attractive. You get complete control, no vendor lock-in, and the illusion of "free" since you're using internal resources. But the math rarely works out that way. Let's break down what it actually costs to build, when building genuinely makes sense, and how to make the right decision for your team.

SendGrid Status Monitoring: How to Track Email Delivery Outages

When SendGrid goes down, your transactional emails stop reaching customers. Password resets fail. Order confirmations vanish. Support tickets never arrive. By the time you notice, customers are already complaining. For DevOps and SRE teams, checking SendGrid status shouldn't be a manual process. It shouldn't wait until customers report it either. For a team sending 10,000 transactional emails per day, a 15-minute outage means roughly 100 emails that never arrived.