When high SEO ranking fails to give you a reliable result: IsItDownRightNow.com failed to detect the WayBack Machine outage
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/11
A high SEO ranking does not automatically indicate a reliable result.
When the WayBack Machine was down a while ago (it responded to traceroute UDP requests, but would not establish TCP connections on ports 80 and 443), the first Google hit for detecting down status (searching for [Archive.is] waybackmachine down – Google Search) failed miserably because it redirected web.archive.org (which fails) to http://www.archive.org (which succeeds):
IsIdDownRightNow failing to detect web.archive.org downtime
Luckily when asking around on Twitter:
- others were experiencing the same problem, not just in The Netherlands, but also in other countries
- after trying a few things, the WayBack machine got backup [Archive.is] before I could try cURL.
- I got pointed at www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime which correctly does check the right subdomain and shows it is down from many locations:
https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime checking for web.archive.org
Highlights from the Twitter thread
https://twitter.com/maikeltjeonline/status/1361307244596453383
A traceroute or tcptraceroute worked fine, but connecting to ports 80 and 443 failse
https://twitter.com/maikeltjeonline/status/1361305841308213249
IsItDownRightNow does an incorrect redirect from web.archive.org to archive.org
This is just as bad as modern browsers hiding subdomains. Subdomains are important!
https://twitter.com/AlexisEvelyn42/status/1361311253189246976
cURL was moot, as the site got up before I could try it
https://twitter.com/jpluimers/status/1361323561848291332
–jeroen
Logs of my tries from various ISPs and locations to reach web.archive.org:
https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/0d40492dc37dc6f9111e9ed15cbbdf76
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