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How We Check

Every status on Outages Now comes from data we can show you. This page explains where it comes from, how often it updates and what our labels mean.

1. The company’s own status page

When a service publishes a status page, we read it every five minutes: the overall status, active incidents, the parts of the service affected and the incident history. We link to the original on every service page, and we quote official updates only briefly and with a link.

2. Our own checks from two places

Every five minutes, two servers in different data centers (Falkenstein and Nuremberg, Germany) each request the service’s public home page once, without signing in. We record whether the site answered, the HTTP status code and how long the answer took.

  • We call a service unreachable only when both checkpoints get no answer at all (a timeout, a refused connection, a DNS or certificate error, or a server error in the 5xx range).
  • If only one checkpoint fails, we treat it as a problem with that checkpoint’s network, not with the service.
  • A block page (HTTP 403) or a rate limit (HTTP 429) still means the site is online: many large sites answer automated requests that way.

Our checks can only see the public website. A service can load fine for us while sign-in, payments, a mobile app or one region is broken, which is why the official status and visitor reports matter too.

3. Reports from visitors

The button on each service page records one report per visitor per service per hour. We do not store IP addresses: each report is kept with a one-way code that changes every day, so reports cannot be linked to you or to each other across days. Reports older than 30 days are deleted. We never copy report counts from other trackers.

What the labels mean

  • No problems detected: the official page reports no incident and our checkpoints reach the site.
  • Some problems: the official page reports a minor incident or degraded performance.
  • Major outage: the official page reports a major or critical incident, or both checkpoints cannot reach the site.
  • Maintenance: planned work announced by the company is in progress.
  • Status unknown: we could not get fresh data. Pages show a warning when our data is more than 20 minutes old.

Limits

Official pages are sometimes updated late, and outages can affect only some users or regions. Treat our pages as a quick check, not a guarantee. For anything urgent, such as payments or travel, contact the company directly.