Definition
A Downdetector report count is the number of problem reports Downdetector received for a service in a given period. It counts people who visited Downdetector and said something was wrong. It does not count users affected, accounts affected, or minutes of downtime.
How Downdetector Collects Reports
Downdetector's published descriptions say it combines problem reports submitted by users with signals from social media and other web sources. It compares the current volume with a baseline, described as the average number of reports for that time of day over the previous year, and shows an incident only when reports are significantly above that baseline. We could not read Downdetector's own methodology page directly, so treat this as a summary of how it describes itself.
Why the Same Outage Gets Different Numbers
During the Microsoft 365 outage of November 12, 2026, outlets reported these Downdetector figures for Outlook.
| Figure | When | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Over 97,000 | By 2 p.m. Eastern | A local US broadcaster |
| About 130,000 | Shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern | Euronews and others |
| 138,058 | Around 1 p.m. Eastern | A later Reuters update |
| About 37,000 | By 6 p.m. Eastern | Euronews |
| At least 43,000, from 72 countries | About 07:00 GMT the next day | Al Jazeera |
All of these can be right. Each is a snapshot of a moving chart, read at a different minute, sometimes for one country and sometimes worldwide.
What the Number Does Not Tell You
- How many people were affected. Most affected users never file a report. Microsoft 365 has hundreds of millions of users, and the peak count was about 130,000.
- How severe it was. Reports rise with news coverage. A widely covered minor fault can outscore a serious one that few people noticed.
- Which service failed. People report against the brand they recognise. On November 12, AWS said its services were operating normally while users reported problems against it.
- When it ended. Reports fall when people stop checking, which can be before the service recovers.
How to Use It
- As a first signal: a sharp rise above baseline usually means something real is happening, often before the vendor confirms it.
- With the official status page: the vendor's page says what failed and gives a reference such as a Microsoft 365 incident ID.
- With a time and a place: if you quote a count, state when it was read and for which country.
Who Runs Downdetector
Downdetector is part of the Ookla business, alongside Speedtest. Ziff Davis agreed in March 2026 to sell that business to Accenture for $1.2 billion and completed the sale on June 17, 2026.
Commonly Confused With
- Official status: what the vendor itself reports. Slower, but authoritative.
- Uptime percentage: the share of time a service was available, published by some vendors. See the AI assistant outage tracker.
- Status aggregators: tools that read official status pages for you. See Downdetector vs StatusGator vs IsDown.