Question 1

How do I check if a service is down right now?

Accepted Answer

Open the map on the homepage, or search the provider name in the header (e.g. AWS, Discord, Cloudflare). Each provider page shows current status, affected regions, and the last 24 hours of incidents. We pull from official statuspages, tech-media reporting, and community submissions.

Question 2

Is it me or is the service actually down?

Accepted Answer

If our map shows red or orange pins for the service and other users in your region are also reporting problems, it's not just you. If we show all-green and no recent community reports, the issue is more likely local, check your internet connection, DNS, or VPN.

Question 3

How fast does GlobalOutageMap detect an outage?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the signal. Official confirmations, our own availability monitoring, media coverage and user reports each arrive at a different moment, the page reflects whichever lands first, usually within minutes.

Question 4

Is GlobalOutageMap free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The map, provider pages, and incident feed are free. A free account watches up to 3 providers with outage emails. Pulse Pro (€7.99 per month) adds unlimited watches, recovery emails and an ad-free site. See /plans.

Question 5

Which official statuspages do you track?

Accepted Answer

Hundreds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, GitHub, GitLab, Stripe, Slack, Discord, Zoom, Atlassian, Datadog, PagerDuty, Twilio, OpenAI, Anthropic, Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, Fastly, Shopify, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and many telecoms. We add providers continuously, see the full provider directory.

Question 6

Which news outlets do you ingest?

Accepted Answer

A curated set of established tech publishers, plus general news outlets when they cover major incidents. Coverage is filtered for outage relevance before it appears here.

Question 7

How do community reports work?

Accepted Answer

Any visitor can share a one-tap experience signal on a provider page (Working / Some issues / Major issues). We aggregate these anonymously to spot problems early, no free-text reports, no individual claims surfaced.

Question 8

What do the pin colors mean?

Accepted Answer

Green = operational, orange = degraded, lighter orange = partial outage, red = full outage, violet = planned maintenance, grey = resolved.

Question 9

What do the pin shapes mean?

Accepted Answer

Filled circle = official statuspage source. Triangle = news media signal. Square = community report. Hollow/dashed = approximate location (country-level only).

Question 10

Why are pins on datacenters and not company headquarters?

Accepted Answer

Because that's where the outage actually lives. An AWS us-east-1 incident affects services in Virginia even though Amazon's HQ is in Seattle. We map to the affected datacenter region whenever the vendor identifies it.

Question 11

What kind of alerts can I get?

Accepted Answer

Free: an email when a provider you watch (up to 3) has a major or critical outage. Pulse Pro: unlimited watched providers, plus an email when the outage is fixed. Free accounts created before 5 October 2026 keep recovery emails. Minor issues and scheduled maintenance do not send an email.

Question 12

How do I watch a specific provider?

Accepted Answer

Open the provider page, tap Watch and confirm your email. Manage all watched providers from /watchlist.

Question 13

How is this different from Downdetector?

Accepted Answer

Downdetector relies almost entirely on user-submitted reports for a small set of consumer apps. We combine official statuspages, news media and community reports across hundreds of providers including cloud, SaaS, telecom and infrastructure, and we pin to datacenter regions, not just company HQ.

Question 14

How is this different from StatusGator?

Accepted Answer

StatusGator aggregates statuspages but has no map, no community layer, and is subscription-only. We add tech-media and community signals, visualise everything geographically, and keep core features free.

Question 15

Does this replace Datadog or PagerDuty?

Accepted Answer

No. Datadog, PagerDuty and New Relic monitor your own systems. We tell you whether the third-party dependencies your systems rely on (AWS, Stripe, Twilio, etc.) are healthy.

Frequently asked questions

Outage basics

Where signals come from

Reading the map

Alerts

Comparison with other trackers