You hit a site; it’s down. You immediately reload; it’s still down. You start to freak out. “How the hell are they down again!? Is anyone in charge over there?! WTF?!” But quite often, it’s just you. And you look like an ass for your rant that you just spewed on Twitter (or on Facebook when it’s Twitter that is down). Thankfully, it looks like Chrome can now potentially save you from that embarrassment.
Tech geeks are very familiar with sites like Down For Everyone Or Just Me (which was incidentally created by a then-Twitter employee and sold earlier this year). You go there, enter a URL and see if others people around the world are having trouble accessing the site as well. But the latest version of Chrome appears to do the same thing for you now, as the blog Rudefox pointed out today.
While trying to load Chatroutlette today (like the rest of us) only to find that it was down, the author got a fairly typical browser note that “Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to chatroulette.com.” But what’s interesting is that below that, it reads “Other users are also experiencing difficulties connecting to this site, so you may have to wait a few minutes.”
See, there are some benefits to Google watching us. They can now save us a trip to Down For Everyone Or Just Me.
[thanks Tom]