Jio down? Downdetector shows sharp spike attributing to user queries
The reported disruptions came a day after the Facebook family of apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram, hit a technical snag leaving scores of users unable to access their social media platforms for nearly six hours before the services were restored.
After Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the outage fiasco seems to have hit closer to home this time as several users reported that the Jio network was down across India. The graph on Downdetector, which analyses tens of millions of daily problem reports, itself showed a sharp spike around 11am – indicating that a large number of complaints regarding disruptions in the Reliance Jio cellular network was reported around that time.
The reported disruptions came a day after the Facebook family of apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram, hit a technical snag leaving scores of users unable to access their social media platforms for nearly six hours before the services were restored. With the Jio cellular network reportedly going off on Wednesday, social media users had a field day again. The #jiodown hashtag was trending on Twitter, with users picking a day-old tweet from Reliance Jio to mock the network over disruption.
The Jio outages reported on Downdetector showed a steady hike from 9am onwards, with the graph peaking around 11am. At 11:08am, there were almost 4,000 reports complaining of Jio cellular network outages across India. Of the reported problems, 41 per cent said there was no signal, 37 per cent had trouble accessing their emails, while 23 per cent said they faced a total blackout.
The live outage map on Downdetector shows the ‘spikes’ in reports over time; it helps users gauge the kind of response the website is getting across the world. If there are a lot of spikes corresponding to the timestamps, it means users all over the world are experiencing similar problems with the website. Downdetector also has a daily historical view of problem reports compared to the baseline volume.
How Downdetector works
Downdetector, according to its official website, offers real-time status information for more than 6,000 services across 45 websites representing 45 countries. When a service provider’s customers are experiencing problems, Downdetector aggregates and analyses this data to determine the potential nature of the issue and then works to alert both the company and community of possible issues.
Also Read | Facebook's longest outage yet was flagged by Downdetector. Here's how it works
As more and more users submit problem reports directly on a company status page on Downdetector, along with an indicator of the type of problem they are experiencing, the tracking service gathers data through Twitter and uses ‘sentiment analysis’ to detect issues for a given company and its location. It also looks at other key indicators from across the web to determine if an extraordinary volume of users is having issues with a monitored company or service.
