Privacy and data

Is It Down AU does not need to know who you are. You do not need an account, and we never ask for a name, email address, phone number or precise location.

What a report contains

  • The service you reported.
  • The type of problem you chose (for example “Signing in”).
  • The state or territory you chose.
  • The time of the report.

We do not accept free-text comments, so nothing you type is published.

Abuse prevention

To stop one person flooding the reports, we store a short code with each report. It is created by scrambling your IP address with a secret key that changes every day (a keyed hash). We never store the IP address itself, and because the key changes daily, codes from different days cannot be linked to each other.

We use the code only to allow one report per service every 30 minutes and at most 6 reports an hour, and to count how many different people reported a problem. The code is removed from reports after 48 hours.

How long we keep data

  • Reports: 90 days, then deleted.
  • The abuse-prevention code: 48 hours, then removed from the report.
  • Automated homepage checks: 30 days.

Website checks

When you check a website, our server loads that site’s homepage once and shows you the result. We don’t keep a record of which websites people check: the result is held in memory for 2 minutes so repeat checks don’t hit the site again, and then discarded. To stop the checker being misused, we count recent checks per visitor in memory using the same daily-changing scrambled code described above, never your IP address itself.

Speed test

The speed test runs in your browser against Cloudflare’s network, using Cloudflare’s open-source speed test engine. Your browser sends and receives test data directly to and from Cloudflare, which therefore sees your IP address, as with any website. Is It Down AU does not receive or store your results, and we turn off the engine’s option to send results to Cloudflare.

Cookies and advertising

Is It Down AU itself sets no cookies. We show ads from Google AdSense to cover running costs. Google and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads, including ads based on your previous visits to this and other websites, and to measure them.

Server logs

Like most websites, our hosting provider may keep standard access logs (which include IP addresses) for security and troubleshooting. The site is hosted on Fly.io in Sydney. Fly.io may keep standard request logs under its own policies; this application does not store IP addresses.