Website Down? Don't Panic Yet
Last Friday at 5pm, a client sent me three WeChat messages in a row saying the site was down. I almost chewed out my outsourced developer on the spot. My heart sank—first thought was I'd messed up some setting again, so I started frantically @-ing our tech guy in the group chat. The dev buddy tossed me a link instead: 'Boss, GitHub (the world's largest code repository—tons of sites and tools are deployed on it) crashed again. Not our fault.' I've messed this up so many times—every time something breaks, I immediately self-doubt. But honestly, a lot of times it's just the underlying service having a hiccup. We really don't need to spiral into self-blame so fast.
What This Tool Is + Who's Using It
The tool is called Days without GitHub incidents. Simply put, it's a countdown board tracking how many consecutive days GitHub—this 'global mega code warehouse'—has gone without an outage. It's not some complex system, just a single page. My friend Dafei, who runs a cross-border e-commerce store in Guangzhou, opens this page first thing whenever clients say the shop won't load—to check if the counter's hit zero (zero means there's an incident). If it has, he can kick back with a cup of tea and wait for the official fix instead of running around like a headless chicken debugging his own stuff.
Cost to Replicate Today
Money: $0. Time: 10 seconds. Technical barrier: just open a browser. First step: type dayswithoutgithubincident.com into your browser and hit enter. See a big number = not down. See 0 = currently down.
Advice by Stage
If you're just starting out and only using off-the-shelf SaaS platforms (like Shopify, Youzan) to build your site, you don't need this tool for now—skip it, because they run on their own servers and don't directly depend on GitHub.
If you have 1-2 clients and hired an outsourced dev for your site or mini-program, I'd suggest opening this first whenever you hit an error—confirm it's not a GitHub issue before reaching out to your developer. Saves a lot of back-and-forth.
If you're scaling with your own tech stack or a technical co-founder, I'd add this to your incident response checklist. Check it first when something goes wrong, so nobody wastes a late night digging through code for nothing.