Guide
12 posts tagged with Guide.
What to do before reporting an app outage
The five-minute checklist that turns a frustrated 'X is broken' into a useful report. Five steps before you open a support ticket — most of them resolve the issue, and the rest give you the evidence the support team actually needs.
How CDN, DNS, and cloud outages affect apps you use every day
Apps you use daily share fewer pieces of infrastructure than you'd think. When one of those pieces fails — a single CDN, a single DNS provider, a single AWS region — half the internet seems to break at once. Here's why, with the canonical examples and what you can do about it.
How to build a simple dependency status dashboard for your team
Every team eventually needs an internal page that shows which of their third-party dependencies are healthy right now. Here's the minimum viable version — what to monitor, what to skip, and where the simple approach breaks down.
DNS vs SSL vs HTTP errors: what actually broke?
A broken page can fail at any of four layers — DNS, TCP, TLS, or HTTP. The error message you see almost never names the layer, but the layer is the entire answer. Here's how to tell them apart in under a minute.
How to check if ChatGPT, Discord, GitHub, or Cloudflare is down
Each of the big four has a status page, but each one tells a different story. The trick is knowing which signal is fast, which is slow, and which is hiding the actual incident. A field guide for each.
Why a website can be down in one country but working everywhere else
The same URL can return 200 OK in Frankfurt and time out in Mumbai. Four mechanisms explain almost every regional outage — GeoDNS, CDN POP failures, BGP routing problems, and government-level filtering. Here's how to tell which one is in play.
Cloudflare error codes: 520, 521, 522, 524, 1015, 1020 decoded
Cloudflare error pages own their own numeric range — 5xx for upstream problems, 1xxx for client-side policy hits. Each code points at a specific failure in a specific place. Here's the field guide.
Connection refused vs connection reset vs connection timed out — which one means what
Three error phrases that look similar but point at completely different failures. One means the server doesn't exist; one means it killed your conversation mid-sentence; one means it ghosted you. Here's how to tell them apart and what each tells you to do.
Why your status page shows green when the service is broken
You're staring at error 503s. You open the vendor's status page. All systems operational. You aren't crazy and the page isn't lying — it's lagging, and the lag is structural. Here's the anatomy of the gap, and what to look at instead.
Status page indicators decoded: what 'minor', 'major', and 'maintenance' actually mean
Every public status page reports the same five-state vocabulary: operational, minor, major, critical, maintenance. Vendors use them differently. Here's what each label is actually trying to tell you — and the edge cases where the label lies.
Is it down for everyone, or just you? A five-minute diagnostic
Most people skip the diagnostic step and jump straight to restarting their router. A clean three-way split — third-party probe, official status page, network isolation — resolves almost every 'is it down' question in five minutes.
What HTTP 403, 404, 429, 500, 502, and 503 errors actually mean
Six HTTP status codes do most of the diagnostic work on a broken-website page. The class digit tells you whose fault it is; the second and third digits tell you which part broke. Here's what each one is really saying — and what to do about it.