How We Detect Outages

Community-driven reports

StatusWorld does not rely on pinging service endpoints or reading official status pages. Instead, we collect real-time problem reports submitted directly by users around the world. Every time someone reports an issue on a service page, that signal is recorded with a timestamp and anonymised location (country-level only).

Report types

Users can specify what kind of problem they are experiencing: website not loading, app issues, login problems, payment failures, streaming errors, or a general outage. This breakdown lets us show not just that a service is down, but which part is affected.

Outage detection threshold

We continuously monitor the volume of incoming reports for each service. When the number of unique reporters within a short rolling window exceeds a statistically significant threshold, the status is automatically changed from Operational to Degraded or Outage.

The threshold adapts to each service individually: a service that normally receives zero reports needs fewer new reports to trigger an alert than a high-traffic service with a steady trickle of background noise.

Status levels

• Operational — report volume is within normal range. No significant issue detected.
• Degraded — elevated report volume. Some users may be experiencing issues.
• Outage — report volume is significantly above baseline. A widespread incident is likely in progress.

Spam and abuse prevention

To maintain signal quality we apply several layers of protection:

• Rate limiting — each IP address is limited to a small number of reports per service within a sliding time window.
• Duplicate suppression — a second report from the same IP for the same service within 5 minutes is silently discarded.
• Honeypot fields — hidden form fields invisible to real users but filled by bots; such submissions are discarded.
• IP hashing — IP addresses are never stored in plain text. They are one-way hashed before storage, so no personal data is retained.

The 24-hour chart

Each service page displays a bar chart of report volume over the past 24 hours, broken into hourly buckets. This gives a clear visual picture of when problems started, how severe they were, and whether the situation is improving or worsening.

Outage history

Confirmed outage events are stored and displayed in the Outage History section of each service page. Each entry shows the start time, end time (once resolved), and duration.

Independence

StatusWorld is fully independent. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of the services listed on this platform. Our status data reflects what real users report, not what a company's own status page says.

Questions?

If you have questions about our methodology or want to suggest improvements, visit our Contact page.