How this works

Studios almost never publish a status page for a live-service game, so there is no server to ping and no official endpoint to poll. What this site measures instead is players: how many distinct people report a problem, in what category, and how that compares to a few hours ago.

Reports are counted in people, not clicks

Every count on a game's page — the live number, the 24-hour chart, the incident history — is the size of a set of anonymous reporter hashes, never the number of rows in the database. A frustrated player tapping the same button ten times counts once. This matters: counting rows instead of people is the single easiest way for a tracker like this one to cry wolf.

Anonymous, and expiring by design

A report carries no account and no email. What identifies "one reporter" for rate-limiting purposes is a SHA-256 hash of your IP address, a server secret, and today's date — which means the same visitor hashes to a different value tomorrow. The hash cannot be reversed, and it cannot be used to follow anyone across days, even by us.

The verdict is deliberately conservative

A page that says "problems detected" when a game is actually fine is worse than a page that says nothing. The thresholds behind "operational" / "some issues reported" / "problems detected" are set high enough that a couple of people with bad Wi-Fi can't turn a game's page red.

Corroboration, where it exists

Where a public, unauthenticated signal exists — a Steam concurrent-player count, most often — it's shown alongside player reports, never in place of them. A real outage should show as reports spiking and that number dropping. Either signal alone is weaker than the two together.

What "no live data yet" means

A handful of pages on this site are still running on placeholder content while we research real games to add. Those pages say so plainly, and search engines are asked not to index them until they carry real, sourced information.

Who writes this

Error-code pages carry a byline. Most are published under IsThisGameDown, the site's editorial account — every claim under it is checked against the labelling rules above before it goes live. Named writers, like Lynxx, cover specific games in more depth. Either way, a page's byline links to who wrote it and what they're checked against.

Not affiliated

IsThisGameDown is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the studios or publishers of the games it tracks. For anything authoritative — patch notes, pricing, official outage announcements — go to that game's own channels, not here.

Corrections

If a fix step, a status label, or anything else on this site is wrong, it should be fixed — get in touch and say which page and what's wrong. Corrections with a source get applied.