Atlassian Acquires StatusPage
techcrunch.comI really love the execution. Neat, slick and they even had the luxury to be open about it in their blog. They attacked a simple-to-understand but real problem, on a niche, making something people wanted to have and not wanted to do. They built the right integrations...making money since the beginning, increasing revenue per user and overall revenue... They probably made lots of mistakes , but according to public information and taking the time to analyze it with some prospective, they did (almost) everything right. Following their traction and revenue, they must have sold for a good price as Atlassian really needs such products to renew their platform and they have the portfolio of customers Statuspage would have tried to acquire. Great story.
This acquisition doesn't fill me with confidence for the future. StatusPage was a clean, simple, and intuitive service. Atlasssian's software is the opposite of clean, simple, and intuitive.
Having used many different bug tracking, help desk, and ticketing softwares… Atlassian does a dam good job. Totally customizable screens, fields, and workflows with a modern UI. A decent webservice API I’ve integrated a few external tools into without much difficulty. I’ve also written a few gadgets and plugins and received a decent amount of attention through their plugin marketplace. Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?
I don’t think you say the same about other competitors right now… ServiceNow? HP SMS or ALM? ClearQuest? I’ve used those and if you consider Atlassian terrible, I’m not sure what words you would use to describe them…
> Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?
I think this is key. There's so much customization allowed that its easy to get wrong. Your experiences can vary drastically between a well configured instance and a poorly configured one.
I'll also add it's not always obviously wrong when it's setup.
For example, of course only QA people can use "Testing passed" transition. Of course there should be x, y, z fields filled out to be able to create the ticket. Well we're at it, let's make sure only the product manager can close a ticket with 'wontfix', and only the release manager can change a fixversion.
This is a really common problem with any workflow tool, where well-intentioned control points get in the way of actually Getting Things Done, both from the perspective of not thinking through all the complex scenarios (what? I have to fill out 5 fields before I can close this as a duplicate??) and from not trusting your employees (don't worry, a jr. dev is not going to re-assign a fix version even though they can -- or at least, they won't do it twice).
For you, there is Github issues. Have fun, cowboy.
More seriously, there's FogBugz, which intentionally is not very customizable to avoid the issues the above poster was referring to.
In my experience, FogBugz is a little too limited, so I do prefer Jira, but only when used by competent people who understand that the customization should not get in the way of getting things done and it should not be used to institutionalize a lack of trust in employees.
Having used HP Quality Centre, JIRA and Team Foundation, I think your snark is unwarranted and there is a middle ground to be found between very basic issue tracking and something completely overbearing like QC.
It's been years and HPQC still gives me nightmares.
I think another thing people get wrong is before even using it they assume they've got to dive into a ton of custom workflows.
I've had some fairly large teams able to use JIRA without a single workflow customization (especially with Agile). We've added custom fields and such along the way for better reporting and such but there is definitely some mileage you can get out of the box with it.
That's one of the reasons why we're switching to a cloud model in addition to the self-hosted server model. Some people wanted an easier more straight forward experience.
We use ServiceNow at work, and it's absolutely horrible. Introduces so much red tape even to do simple things like become an administrator on a virtual machine requested against your account .
How do companies end up with the Service Now cancer? Are their sales meetings just hooker and coke parties? I've used it at two different companies and I wondered how anyone could look at it and think 'ok let's buy into this pile of horse shit'. My cat could do a better job.
You obviously haven't seen Remedy.
> In their official announcement today, the StatusPage co-founders also note that when the team explored the acquisition, “we were aligned on three important things: our complementary cultures, our desire to offer StatusPage as a standalone product, and our shared vision of the future of software.”
Standalone product. I think it will be safe.
Bitbucket has remained a standalone product, but I don't think many of its original mercurial userbase feel like it's been "safe".
When Atlassian bought bitbucket it was the place to host mercurial repositories. Now it's a git hosting service that hasn't gotten around to turning off mercurial support yet.
Hi timv, Bitbucket engineer here. I'm not on the PM team, but to my knowledge we have no plans to discontinue Hg support. The Bitbucket repo population is roughly 90% Git and 10% Mercurial, but due to our scale that is still a freaking huge number of Hg repos. We also hired one of the core Mercurial contributors last year to ensure we continue to improve our offering for both DVCSs. Of course I can't personally guarantee anything, but if I were an Hg user, I'd feel pretty confident that Bitbucket's support isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
In fact, we just launched Hg support for Bitbucket's built-in CI/CD, Bitbucket Pipelines:
https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/07/26/bitbucket-pipelines-be...
Is that Atlasian or the general decline of HG? I havent installed HG in a few years now, and i am seeing the big projects still on HG switching to git.
Apparently Mercurial still accounts for 10% of BitBucket repos. That could be a profitable niche for a smaller company.
Also, most of the projects I've seen switch to Git have moved to GitHub. Partly network effects, partly Atlassian.
It would be a terrible move to disable mercurial support since Bitbucket is pretty much the only place you can host your Hg repo remotely with reputation. Other competitors just aren't up to bar.
I use JIRA, Confluence, and BitBucket daily and I'm a big fan of all three. Yeah, there's some aspects of their products I don't like, but overall I'm very happy with Atlassian offerings.
I'm kind of got to be a Confluence Wiki Admin without prior notice and overall I would agree that they do a good job - but everything addon and macro related could get some clear and concise overhaul. I understand it's an ecosystem and there are lot's of clever and good ideas floating around but I'm never sure what can I use on my local confluence instance and what not... some documentation for newbie "idiot" developers is there.. and something for total professionals.. anything in between seems lacking. Luckily there is some stuff on bitbucket that you can analyse to get a grip on some ideas but it's neither intuitive nor easy.
TL;DR: Confluence besides their Cloud is kind of badly treated and documentation for modern and up to scratch immediate plugin development is mostly nonexistent.
So do I, and they're all tools that get the job done, but without any finesse or real care.
Bitbucket is inferior in every way go Github, with a UI that screams feature box ticking. Confluence is a place for documentation to go and die a slow death, and I'm still convinced Jira was entirely designed to keep project managers and mouse manufacturers in business - you can't do anything without fifteen clicks around the screen.
Give me Github, a repository full of markdown files, and Trello any day of the week.
When I saw the quote by the StatusPage founders saying they were aligned with Atlassian, I laughed. These companies are near polar opposites.
Disagree on the Atlassian, well, JIRA at least. Just had to introduce it to a new group, we got cut short on the initial intro so I didn't get through much. Then to my surprise they were off and running the next day, they just got it.
I remember when I was doing a talk in Melbourne, another developer told me what he didn't like about Atlassian was that they essentially only had one product (was it Jira? or Confluence? can't remember) and almost everything else in their offering set; they bought from other people and re-engineered to fit into their product line.
Having administered, Jira, Confluence and Bamboo servers (all with slightly different installation steps, logging and means to connect to LDAP), what he said made sense.
That being side, I really like Confluence. It's an amazing wiki, even though it's a bit expensive (although they do have free open source project licenses) and kinda resource hog.
Luckily they do seem to have put some effort into making the administration of each project more consistent (at least between Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket Server). I've definitely noticed that things are slowly becoming more similar each release (and they got a lot more consistant in the frontend last year too).
Their biggest product is JIRA followed by Confluence. Let's look at acquisitions vs internal developments:
- 2003: JIRA - In-house
- ~2004: Confluence - In-house
- ~2007: Fisheye, Crucible (code analysis) - Acquisition
- ~2008: Bamboo (builds) - Acquisition
- 2010: Bitbucket - Acquisition
- 2011: SourceTree - Acquisition
- ~2012: Bonfire (JIRA Capture - screencast bugcatcher) - In-house
- ~2013: HipChat - Acquisition
- ~2013: Stash (BitBucket Server) - In-house
- ~2013: JIRA Service Desk - In-house
- ~2014: JIRA Portfolio (capacity management for Agile) - In-house
- 2014: Wikidocs, Doctape - Acquisitions
- 2015: BlueJimp, Hall, StatusPage - Acquisitions
But what's the right way to start a product today? It's easy to make big bets when you're a start-up, but when you already own several products, you're exposing the brand with every decision. If a product doesn't find its market fit on day #1, if you don't support every combination of platforms, if it really fits a niche but if you also expose the product to customers who were not the initial target, if the pricing is wrong, if it doesn't fit a certain usecase => Your brand is exposed.
I understand the trend to reach growth by external acquisitions, then achieve earnings by scaling the product to the Atlassian size. It's easier to explain it to the market, plus you've already proven the features match the customer case.
Because something else in in-house at Atlassian: Going from Server products to cloud products with the same codebase (a real technological performance), developing the Plugins 2 system and the Atlassian Marketplace, developing an internal PAAS platform, hosting microservices [1], developing a uniform graphic design and graphic library, developing the sales, creating a big conference for their products in CA (named Summit), creating the developer conference (AtlasCamp in Europe), the marketing machine and relationships with journals. Let's give credit to the workers of the shadow: Most of the work that's needed to make great products aren't features.
Maybe, after all, it's a company whose core business became to bring features from niche/luxury/early adopters to enterprise. They shorten the path of good ideas from hackers to IBM-style customers. It's important to us, developers, because they helps migrating big old companies like banks and government to new methods. The features of the software you put in are important, but what's more important is how to massively develop adoption. Man I'd love to be a PM for Atlassian ;)
[1] https://www.atlassian.com/atlascamp/2016/archives/build-amaz... - and you can look at their other developer conference videos too.
Nice overview! Don't forget Bitbucket Pipelines (in-house), which is intended to replace Bamboo Cloud:
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/05/introducing-bitbucket-pip...
(Atlassian employee here)
I think it can make sense. When you are a startup, you can make a bet-the-company bet. In fact, that's what your investors want. When you're a mature company, it's much harder to take the risk. (And the risk could be as simple as pulling your 3 best developers off the core product) Buying both the product and the team that built it can make sense, especially if you already have the right customer base. If you do it often enough to get good at it, you know the price to pay, and how to integrate it afterwards.
For what it's worth, serial acquirers generally get good at it and outperform one-off acquirers. [0]
> ~2008: Bamboo (builds) - Acquisition
Who did they buy Bamboo from?
The first Atlassian releases of Bamboo were so bad we went back to using CruiseControl. I'm astonished that they actually paid money to acquire that.
You can add Allinea in there somehwere as Acquisition. Specialized in debugging of parallel code including GPU support.
> Your brand is exposed.
It depends on the brand.
Software is expected to be improved over time. Which implies a less-improved state as a starting point.
The idea that customers expect you to teleport to the Platonic ideal of a product isn't very realistic.
Have you tried xwiki? Last time we were on a really tight budget, we ended up with it and was very nice. Confluence could only handle our use case with 2 separate paid plugins installed!
Their original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470
Thanks for the link. It is great to see how things move from the early beginnings to an acquisition
The ability to subscribe to other companies' status pages has saved me so much time and headache. StatusPage has done something awesome here, for all the people that rely on various services moreso than the service providers themselves. Congrats to the team!
"Adding a service like StatusPage, which launched three years ago, seems like a natural fit for Atlassian."
Why is this a natural fit for Atlassian? Not being snarky, I just don't see how this is any more a natural fit for Atlassian than lots of other companies that provide picks-and-shovels to the software builders of the world.
Atlassian has tooling around handling support (Service Desk), bug tracking (Jira), and I think it seems like a natural extension to integrate those products into an external facing service like StatusPage.
May be because there is plenty of opportunity for upselling StatusPage to the existing and new customers of Atlassian?
One problem with the stack right now is if you are using Jira to track issues internally then users who aren't party to the ticket aren't able to see what's going on very easily. Perhaps/hopefully this will provide that sort of ongoing progress report, so if the database goes down there aren't 50 support tickets.
Because Atlassian's core skills these days seem to be oriented towards getting enterprises to buy their software.
Their products are decent enough, but certainly not exceptional. Their pace of development has slowed to a crawl. The word on the street is that they're pouring massive investment into HipChat, yet it's been easily outdone by Slack.
Yet, they're doing well, because they manage to package it all up at just the right price point, with just the right set of services to get people to buy it.
Something like StatusPage fits them well because it's an existing, working, solution that they can monetize.
Jira goes down a lot. Maybe it helps you notice faster?
Must be a problem with your installation. I've used Jira at 2 separate companies and it never went down (it was purposefully restarted a few times a year to apply updates).
Edit: I see that HipChat's reliability is a big issue for several posters, maybe your installation has that. The ones I've used were fairly basic.
As a happy StatusPage user, I am worried about this acquisition. Been more and more frustrated with Atlassian and recently we had to move away from HipChat due to multiple issues (constant downtimes).
What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?
We use Cachet[1], an open source alternative. We checked out many status page services out there, but found it hard to understand how some of them (web apps with a handful of pages) were more expensive than our accounting system or project management services we subscribe to?!?
[1] - https://cachethq.io/
Status pages are best hosted offsite, which means status page companies can easily justify higher prices since the alternative is to run your own servers exclusively for the status page (can't just throw the status page software on your app server).
I'm skeptical that running Cachet on your own servers would be cheaper than StatusPage's smallest plan, especially if you have any kind of redundancy in place.
Our main stack is on Amazon AWS (West Coast) and we run Cachet on a $5/mo Digital Ocean Droplet on the East Coast for redundancy. Took about 30 minutes to set up Cachet on the DO VPS.
That is enough redundancy for our little bootstrapped web app until we are large enough to be able to afford something better.
And for another $5 you could likely round robin dns a vpn in Europe. Being cheap is fun.
Hey, Lead Developer of Cachet here! Thanks for sharing a link to our project!
@Everyone, if there is anything I can do to help, let me know! You can email us james@alt-three.com to discuss more.
For those interested - I just blogged about how we set this up here: http://devan.blaze.com.au/blog/2016/7/15/building-a-status-p...
Some are not that expensive, Runstatus[1] is 5$ a year with first year free.
[1] - https://runstatus.com
Are you really going to ditch StatusPage that quickly? I'm not a huge Atlassian fan myself, but StatusPage is a great tool.
Not really, just looking for alternatives. Atlassian so far has been leaving a bad taste for us.
It is good to know which alternatives exist, "just in case".
>What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?
hund.io is the best alternative in my opinion. It integrates with pingdom too, and has some other cool features.
Official blog post here:
Seems like the perfect acquisition for handling HipChat's downtime.
Ouch.
I know snark is generally frowned upon, but HipChat and hosted JIRA/Confluence downtimes have been serious issues for us.
Deserved in this case...HipChat went from rock solid and growing feature list to login failures and crashing all the time. On top of that it's losing features like video.
We use hipchat on premise and still have quite a few issues with it going down. It isn't just the hosted version that is meh fwiw.
Jira, although it is slow, works quite well for our on-premise version.
Count us as one of the ones that switched away from HipChat due to reliability issues. And I mean daily issues. We actually used our own in-house IRC server before but switched to HipChat because we didn't want to manage it anymore. It was cheaper and there were fewer problems with that IRC server. We finally switched away from HipChat to Slack to have a usable chat system and it's been great. We gave HipChat a chance and reported issues regularly, but they seem to be making no progress on reliability.
StatusPage is a great company and service, so this is really disappointing news in my book. HipChat was great before Atlassian bought it.
Sorry, as a paying customer this is true. Hipchat in particular is down almost daily and its basically a running joke at this point.
Interesting. We run our entire company on (paid) Hipchat across a wide range of timezones and have very few problems.
We switched from Hipchat because of this.
We did too. After using HipChat for years the frequent downtime became more painful than the costs of switching to Slack.
Yeah i mean, this is basically why we switch to Slack. Right as we were deciding if we should start investing more money and time into Hipchat.
Wish my place switched to sth better. It's quite terrible. Video never works, constant issues with notifications, crappy search (at least on OSX)...
Not limited to just those products, we have issues with BitBucket.
One example: it can sometimes take > 5 mins to merge a PR.
Bitbucket Server developer here. I'm not sure if you're on Bitbucket Server or Cloud, but either way >5 minute merges doesn't sound right. Have you tried creating a support ticket?
How many open PRs do you have targeting the branch you're merging into it? We heard through the grapevine that there are serious performance problems if you have more than 60-80 or so.
The solution for us was to decline those old PRs.
That's concerning. We use GitHub with a monorepo and have 462 open PRa without issue.
Add the recent bitbucket change that broke TeamCity fetching repos for building.
Having gone from self-hosted to their hosted solution with both Jira and Hipchat I really wonder why they don't seem to do better sharding.
Is Jira so bad to scale in their hosted configuration that it has to be slow for everyone? Our local jira, after some experienced tweaking, was so much more responsive... it's weird.
I thought HN was a place where snarky comments don't get upvoted. I can go to proggit for that.
ahh burn!
They bought StatusPage so could manually alter HipChat's downtime history. I jest.
It's fun to be snarky, but maybe leave it alone for a day, or a comment thread? Can't we just be happy for Atlassian and StatusPage today and gripe later? There are certainly lots of employees at both places reading this comment section.
I'm also sure HipChat knows about, and is embarrassed about, outages. Shaming them accomplishes nothing.
Congrats Scott & the StatusPage team! I interviewed for a position with StatusPage at one point (ended up going with a different company), but I have huge respect for the product and the team.
I'm surprised they sold. This seems like a fantastic business.
Seems like self-employment, not business, which gets cut from the bill the minute the next down cycle shows.
There is such a thing as so cheap it's not worth cancelling. These status pages are a perfect example.
Software for people who make software for people who make software for people who make software.
Congratulations. I enjoyed the clear, transparent blog post, although my fundamental question "Will they shut down the service in the mid-to-long term or force us to become an Atlassian customer?" took some time to get an answer to.
I also felt their blog post was all about their journey, which while interesting doesn't really present any value for us as a customer. It would have been nice to know why the acquisition is in the customers' best interest rather than only the founders' (of course both are important).
Congrats guys! Very happy for you!!
Congrats Steve, Scott, and Danny!
Off topic - What are some alternatives to JIRA?
There are, no exaggeration, probably thousands of alternatives. People are very subjective in what they want out of a task tracker, so I'd start by making a list of what you think you need and in what format, then go from there.
Which subset of functionality do you need?
Issue tracking? Kanban? A means to align corporate initiatives with dev effort? Defect tracking with built-in links to commits and vice-versa?
Oh right, thanks for asking. Issue tracking and Kanban mostly
I'd suggest Phabricator[1]. Although it was quite hard to use at first, after few months we really love it!
Phabricator looks great, but can the end user edit the menus to change the spelling of Maniphest, Phriction, Conpherence, Phame, Pholio etc.?? That's cute for 5 seconds but then would drive me crazy if I had to see that on a day to day basis.
I don't think you can change, as they consider these component names to be an app name (the same way as JIRA has Bamboo, Confluence, etc.)[1] In the actual UI they do include description on what each one is[2] and you can activate Serious Business Mode[3] to tone down all other jokes in the UI.
Everyone in our development team eventually get used to the names, and everyone loved all the little jokes, so we leave the Serious Business Mode off, though.
On the other hand, you can customize the sidebar, deactivate stuff the team is not using, and such. Default install is definitely overwhelming.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Phabricator-Why-is-the-Browse-feature-...
[2]: https://files.grid.in.th/iXMhtQ.png
[3]: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...
Seconding Phabricator. After a previous job, Jira was giving me irrational corporate-PTSD flashbacks, and Phabricator did much to alleviate that. It's a decent balance of complexity and simplicity.
GitLab has issue tracking and we're adding Kanban next month https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17907
Another great open source alternative is Taiga https://taiga.io/
JetBrains YouTrack would be my suggestion.
I wonder when Atlassian will buy Jetbrains.
Let's hope never. Jet Brains make amazing software. Would suck for them to be aquired by the likes of Atlassian. Their products would turn to rubbish.
Could'nt some static pages ( based on templates ) hosted on S3 ( with its high reliability ) do the job?
No. You also need something that responds to events and reports on them. Statuspage integrates with pingdom, new relic, and datadog.
If you're worried about this, you can always use the other status page site that many other startups and large corps use: http://www.status.io
Congrats!
Question: If my web service is down, how do my customers know ex-ante to check in with statuspage.io for more information?
I wonder if this means I'll be able to unsubscribe to the Atlasssian SMS notifications. They make is so easy to subscribe, but no details how to unsubscribe.
Reply to the SMS message with with "STOP"
I think it would be nice if there were clearer instructions. Plus, I'm hesitant as I don't know if texting 'STOP' to a +1 (US) number from the UK.
I've just looked up the cost, it would be about £0.20 to send it.
I did tweet them about it a while ago, but I din't think it really made sense.
Fwiw replying with a message containing only the word STOP is a quasi-standard for unsubscribing that should work with any reputable SMS bot.
Ahh. Sorry about that. Shoot us an note to hi at statuspage.io and we'll get you taken off. No text messaging necessary :)
That's okay, I sent the STOP text and looks like it's done the job. Thanks for replying!
no problem!
as a customer of many companies who use status page, i do not understand it at all. this is just a nice looking page with some history to it?
most of my encounters with status pages have outdated information such as i am checking your page because i think you are down, but you dont list that you are down, yet. or when they are having a problem, there's a very tiny indicator and somewhat useless message.
what could this possibly bring atlassian that they couldn't build themselves?
StatusPage is well known and has many customers, so I think this is more about buying the business than merely the product.
'Outside Your Infrastructure, Always Up'
AWS has outages too, also statuspage.io own site reports, Hosted Pages Uptime 99.969%
99.969 != always.
Pricing also isn't too shabby, Enterprise starts at $1499/mo. Billed annually.
For small 18.000$ a year, one should be able to setup your own external monitoring, with email, Facebook, twitter and what not for hooks to update your users of the service status where the sky is the limit, not the limits statuspage.io sets for your account.
Enterprise pricing is not about being cheaper than it would be for you to do it yourself. It's about you simply not having to do it yourself. You might be an organization that only employs 5 developers. It's much easier to pay a small fraction of what you pay one of them than it is to pull 1-3 of them off of what they're working on and have them build you a buggy implementation of the same thing that won't be ready for many months.
It is always easier to pay somebody else to do it? Whats the point you try to make? I never mentioned it is cheaper to do it yourself. And enterprise is certainly not for teams of 5 people, 'Starts At 50 Admin Members'
Setting up the statuspage.io, monitoring it, keeping things as they should, adding new stuff to monitor thats not a task one of those 5 will be doing regularly? And what if he does a poor job at that? You end up with what you say, the same buggy level of monitoring. So what _is_ the excuse not to make your own and pay significant amounts of money to a third party?
I say 18.000 is a lot of money for a service that reports your outages (good 3 month salary here, and in three months one can code a lot). And if you do it yourself you have all the freedom of choice how you monitor what you monitor how you report to your users instead of relying on the options statuspage.io offers, there is no limit
And why would your own monitoring be more buggy then some setup a third party deems to be ideal? You can make a perfect fit, gives you another view on your own products etc. Full control is key, in house solutions, not saving money.
> And enterprise is certainly not for teams of 5 people, 'Starts At 50 Admin Members'
I said 5 developers. My first job was on a team of ~12 developers for a company with 30,000 employees. Developer time was gold and as such the company often purchased products that we probably could have built in house given sufficient time.
> And if you do it yourself you have all the freedom of choice how you monitor what you monitor how you report to your users instead of relying on the options statuspage.io offers, there is no limit
If you need something an off-the-shelf option doesn't offer than you wouldn't be considering it in the first place. If you have truly odd requirements you're going to be forced to build your own anyway.
> And why would your own monitoring be more buggy then some setup a third party deems to be ideal?
StatusPage's Show HN was a little over 3.5 years ago. There's no way you can build something less buggy in 3 months. This is a perfect example of not only developer hubris and "Not Made Here" bias, but the problem of trying to estimate the time to walk up the coast[0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-esti...
12 devs on 30.000 employees? This was an (IT related) company that would be a possible customer of statuspage.io? I have to admit i'm very curious what company, industry this was/is or services were provided. It's a strange balance 12 over 30000
And im curious if* you wouldn't have liked it more if you did have more time, resources, colleague to have had the chance to develop those things in house, yourself. And having another product to sell instead of buying a service from a (potential) competitor?
Also i doubt they have been coding for 3.5 years, and if their show HN was 3.5 years ago, very nice promotion for them. But that doesn't say anything about the quality of the product. From what i have been reading over the years from their development they are just integrators of already existing technology. So if you want me to integrate APIs for 3 months, i think i can get quite a long way.... by myself in the evening hours and weekend even.
They started with outsourcing most of their services used (mailgun for mail, twilio for sms, etc etc), so i rather develop something myself, (and yes in 3 months i can integrate a lot of 3rd party services via APIs). So if you prefer to OUTSOURCE, your service to a party that outsources their services again, and find this of a higher quality of service then* writing your own (which give you options to resell that product etc), then i think we just have different view of what quality is.
Nonetheless, weekend is coming, hope you have a good weekend :) probably in case of reply will read it only after
I usually use "http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/".
If your site's back end is down, the site itself should be saying something intelligent. ("Ngnix timeout", or Cloudflare's error message blaming the site server, is kind of lame, but it's something.)
Cloudflare will serve any page you like during an outage.
If you pay them.
Sites aren't all or nothing. It's possible something like just image uploads might be broken, or maybe you want to keep people updated as the issues progress.