# Updog

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Updog and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Updog as a quick way to check whether services like GitHub are having outages, often alongside DownDetector. No caveat recurs in the quotes.

## Why people recommend it

- Memorable name for an uptime app (1 comments): "whoever came up with updog over there as the name of your uptime app is a marketing genius" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255441))
- Reports service outages quickly (1 comments): "reported the incident 13 minutes ago" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158327))
- Checked alongside DownDetector during outages (1 comments): "I always check DownDetector and Updog whenever something seems strange about GitHub behavior" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876499))
- Quite good in practice (1 comments): "which actually has been quite good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761124))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Uptime Kuma](https://hackerapproved.com/p/uptime-kuma.md): 17 recommend
- [Healthchecks.io](https://hackerapproved.com/p/healthchecks-io.md): 12 recommend
- [UpDown.io](https://hackerapproved.com/p/updown-io.md): 5 recommend
- [Heartbeat](https://hackerapproved.com/p/heartbeat.md): 5 recommend
- [Sigabrt.dev](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sigabrt-dev.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Updog", https://hackerapproved.com/p/updog/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).