Frequently Asked Questions

"Is The Service Down?" collects status reports from a series of sources. Through realtime "sentiment analysis" of this data, our system is able to automatically determine outages and service interruptions at a very early stage. One of the sources that we analyze are reports on Twitter. Our system detects outages when the number of reports shows a significant jump relative to the baseline.

Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to reviews and social media for a variety of applications, ranging from marketing to customer service.

Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document. The attitude may be his or her judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing), or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

"Is The Service Down?" selects and displays user reports from social media related to problems. We can not guarantee the accuracy of those reports. Although we constantly work to improve the sentiment analysis algoritm, we can't guarantee that "false positives" aren't shown.

By displaying user comments that report issues, we do not claim that a company is suffering from an outage or any other kind of problem. By collecting and displaying reports from multiple sources, we allow visitors of our website to determine for themselves if a certain service is having issues. Visitors who need to know for sure if a company or service is having problems should contact this company directly.

"Is The Service Down?" is not associated with any service, corporation or organization that we monitor.

We track communications/mobile services, internet providers (ISPs), gaming services/networks, instant messaging services, video/audio streaming services and more.

Of course! Please send us a message with details of the service or company you would like to see on our site.