What's the first thing you do when your API goes down?
When your API goes down, what's your actual first move?
Ours is always the same: check whether it's really down, or just down for us. Half our "outages" turned out to be one flaky region or someone's wifi. Then we check what changed in the last hour, a deploy, a DNS change, a cert.
Curious how everyone else handles it. Do you curl it, check a dashboard, tail logs, or just panic in Slack?
The interesting part isn’t the tooling—it’s the ambiguity of failure.
Most “API down” incidents aren’t binary outages, they’re partial degradations that only show up in specific regions, users, or dependencies. The real challenge is quickly separating global failure from local perception before you start debugging the wrong layer.
Exactly. A check from one location can't tell "actually down" from "looks down from here," which is why the gray failures are the worst. A 200 with half the payload missing sails past almost every uptime check out there. How do you catch those, error rate, latency, or actual response content?
That's a good question.
I don't think the interesting part is choosing between error rate, latency, or response content.
Your reply made me think about a deeper implication of how you're deciding what the product should treat as evidence of failure. I don't think I can do that reasoning justice in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you on?
You are definitely right, and it is a complex topic.
Feel free to reach out to me on my mail alexander@exit1,dev Would love to chat some more :)
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.