I Built a 4-Layer Website Outage Checker in 40 Days - Here's What I Learned (and the Weird Traffic Spike I Can't Explain)

The Problem With "Is It Down?"

You're trying to load a site. It spins. Nothing happens. So you do what everyone does - you open a new tab and Google "is [site] down."

What comes back is a mess. Forum posts from 2019. Reddit threads where someone says "working for me." A handful of third-party status aggregators that are either slow, ad-heavy, or just wrong. You're no more informed than you were 60 seconds ago.

That frustration is exactly why I built isitdown.page.

Why I Built It

I wanted a fast, reliable, no-nonsense answer to one question: is this site down for everyone, or just me?

The tools that existed felt like they were built to fill a SEO gap rather than actually solve the problem. A quick check, a binary result, move on. But the reality is that "is a site down" isn't a binary question. A server can respond without a page loading. DNS can resolve without the site being reachable. I wanted something that actually dug in.

So 40 days ago I started building.

What Makes It Different: The 4-Layer Verification System

The hardest part of this build, and the thing I'm most proud of, was getting the verification system right.

Most outage checkers do one check - they ping a server and report back. isitdown.page runs four layers:

DNS resolution - Can the domain name be resolved to an IP address at all?
Server connectivity - Is the server actually reachable on the expected port?
HTTP response - Is the server returning a valid response code?
Page content - Is the page actually loading with real content, or returning an error wrapped in a 200?

That last layer is the one most tools skip. A server can return a 200 OK status while showing a maintenance page, a Cloudflare error, or a blank screen. Without checking page content, you'd call that "up" when the user experience is clearly broken.

Getting all four layers working reliably, and fast, took most of the first few weeks. Worth it.

The Chrome Extension

I also built a Chrome extension to make this even faster in practice.

When you're on a site that seems broken or unresponsive, you click the extension icon. It runs the full 4-layer check and tells you immediately: down for everyone, or just you. No new tab, no search, no digging through results.

The extension is built with Manifest V3 and is currently awaiting approval in the Chrome Web Store. That's the next big milestone.

How I Built It

I used Lovable for the main site and Claude Code for the extension. The backend runs on Supabase.

Lovable let me move fast on the front end without getting bogged down in setup. Claude Code was the right tool for the extension specifically - working with Manifest V3 has some quirks, and having an AI that could reason through the service worker architecture and permission scoping saved me a significant amount of time.

The stack is intentionally lean. This is a utility tool - it needs to be fast and reliable, not feature-heavy.

The Traffic Spike I Can't Explain

Here's the thing I didn't expect.

I built this quietly. No launch post, no Product Hunt, no promotion of any kind for the first month. I was focused on getting the product right.

Then I checked GA4 this week and saw this: 242 active users, 254 sessions, 1.4K events in the last 7 days - up 1,714% from the previous period. The chart goes flat for weeks and then spikes sharply starting around April 20.

I genuinely don't know what triggered it. My best guess is that a dedicated outage page I published for Discord (around April 16) got indexed and started pulling organic search traffic. People search "is Discord down" constantly, especially when there's an actual outage. If that page is ranking for even a fraction of that traffic, the numbers make sense.

That's now a core part of the strategy: build dedicated, well-optimized outage pages for the most-searched services. Discord is live. Spotify is next.

The 30-Day Challenge

Starting April 24, I'm running a structured 30-day traffic challenge. Three goals:

1,000 unique visitors
10 outage pages indexed in Google
Chrome extension approved

The plan is a mix of SEO (outage pages for high-traffic services), Reddit (r/SideProject and r/webdev - following the 90/10 rule, 9 genuine comments for every 1 promotional post), and eventually a Product Hunt launch in week 4.

I'll be documenting progress as I go. The organic spike before I even started promoting tells me there's real search intent here - the challenge is whether I can build on it systematically.

What I've Learned So Far

A few things that surprised me in 40 days of building:

Utility tools attract organic traffic faster than you'd expect. There's no community to build, no content flywheel to spin up. People just search for the thing and either find you or they don't. Getting the outage pages indexed early was the right call.
The hardest part is usually the thing that makes it worth building. The 4-layer verification system was genuinely difficult to get right. But it's also the core reason the tool is better than the alternatives. Don't cut that corner.
AI-assisted building is real. I built the entire Chrome extension with Claude Code. That would have taken me significantly longer solo. This isn't a side note - it's a meaningful shift in what a solo builder can ship in 40 days.

What's Next

Chrome extension approval
Outage pages for Spotify, GitHub, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and more
Ads integration (the tool is and will stay free - ads will eventually fund it)
Product Hunt launch in late May

If you've built anything in the monitoring or outage space, I'd genuinely like to hear what worked. And if you want to follow the 30-day challenge, I'll be posting updates here on IH.

isitdown.page