User reports — i.e. the number of people who google “is X down” and then click a Down Detector link.
It’s a clever way of getting reasonably accurate data very quickly and easily, though it does have it’s flaws — the data is pretty noisy and users often attribute outages to the wrong service (e.g. blaming their ISP or Microsoft or something when YouTube is down, or vice versa).
I would guess the user is asking what are down detector's dependencies... E.g. can their website function I'd us-east-2 goes down? Or a GCP equivalent? Or are they on a self-hosted server ? What would cause the metrics to be "off"
It’s a clever way of getting reasonably accurate data very quickly and easily, though it does have it’s flaws — the data is pretty noisy and users often attribute outages to the wrong service (e.g. blaming their ISP or Microsoft or something when YouTube is down, or vice versa).