The villain origin story
December 2024. 11 PM. I'm on the couch. Phone buzzes.
"Hey, the AI feature is broken."
I check our dashboards. Everything's green. Our servers are fine. Our database is fine. Our CDN is fine.
OpenAI is down.
Not us. OpenAI. Their status page? Still showing "All Systems Operational." It took them over an hour to even acknowledge it. By then I'd already gotten 14 messages from users who thought we broke something.
Two weeks later — same thing. OpenAI down again. 4+ hours. Same dance. Same blame.
I started to notice a pattern.
The pattern
Every monitoring tool I've ever used — Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Datadog — they all answer the same question: is MY site up?
That's... not the question anymore.
Your site is up. Your checkout is up. Your auth is up. But Stripe's API is returning 500s, so your checkout silently fails. Twilio is lagging, so your 2FA codes arrive 30 minutes late. OpenAI is down, so every AI feature you've built returns a loading spinner forever.
Your infrastructure is healthy. Your users are furious. And the status pages of those providers? They'll update eventually. Maybe. If they feel like it.
→ You find out from customer complaints
→ You find out from someone on Twitter
→ You find out from Downdetector — which, by the way, went down during the November 2025 Cloudflare outage. The site that tracks outages couldn't track the outage.
I'm not making this up.
It's getting worse
This isn't a pessimism play. It's math.
Every major cloud provider is pouring money into GPU clusters and AI infrastructure. Forrester — not some blogger, an actual analyst firm willing to stake their reputation on it — predicted at least two major multi-day hyperscaler outages in 2026. The reason? Legacy systems getting neglected while everyone races to ship the next model. TechTarget covered it too — cloud outages are expected to be the new normal.
And we're already seeing it. In the first three months of 2026 alone:
Anthropic (March 17-18) — Claude went down hard. API 500 errors everywhere. Chat, coding tools, mobile — all dead. IBTimes reported on the global disruption. Developers on Twitter called it "a snow day". StatusGator tracked 9+ hours of downtime on March 18 alone. Earlier in February, StatusGator detected an Anthropic outage 1 hour and 47 minutes before Anthropic acknowledged it on their own status page. Almost two hours of "All Systems Operational" while nothing was operational.
GitHub (February) — Six separate incidents in one month. The worst one took out GitHub Actions and Codespaces for nearly six hours. Then on March 18, webhook deliveries went from ~5 second latency to 160 seconds. That's a 32x spike. On the same day Cloudflare was also having issues. Fun times.
Cloudflare (March 18) — Pages API, Pages Builds, and Workers Builds all hit with 500s and build failures. If you were deploying that day, you weren't deploying that day. This came after the November 2025 mega-outage that took out X, Spotify, ChatGPT, Canva, Discord, and dozens more — and a second outage in December.
Stripe — 13 incidents in the last 90 days. Three major outages. The payment processor. Thirteen incidents in three months.
AI coding agents are shipping 1,300 PRs a week at Stripe now. That's incredible. It's also 1,300 chances per week for something subtle to break. The faster everyone ships, the more things break. The more things break, the more you need to know about it before your users do.
I'm not anti-AI — I literally built CanaryOps using Claude Code. But the tool that helps me build faster is also the tool that goes down at 11 PM on a Tuesday. The irony isn't lost on me.
The "I'll just build it" moment
Every developer has this moment. The sensible voice in your head says "there's probably a tool for this." You google it. There isn't. Well, there is — but it costs $300/month and requires a sales call and a 47-slide onboarding deck.
So you do what developers do.
You open your terminal at 11 PM on a Tuesday and whisper "how hard can it be."
(Narrator: it was not that hard.)
What I built
CanaryOps — monitors the APIs you depend on. Not your site. Your dependencies.
The idea is dead simple: ping Stripe, OpenAI, Twilio, Cloudflare, SendGrid, and about 10 other common APIs at regular intervals. When something starts returning errors or degrading — email alert. Before the status page updates. Before the user complains. Before you find out from a meme on Twitter.
Stack:
- Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript
- Supabase for auth and database
- Resend for email alerts
- Vercel cron for the check engine
- Lemon Squeezy for billing (because Stripe wanted me to incorporate a company just to accept payments, which is a whole different rant)
How it works:
- Sign up, pick the APIs you use from a preset list (or add any custom URL)
- CanaryOps pings them at regular intervals
- Something's off → you get an email
- You now have a 5-minute head start over your users
That's it. No Kubernetes. No Grafana dashboards that require a PhD to read. No 47-slide onboarding deck.
Why email and not Slack/Discord/SMS
Because email is the cockroach of the internet. SMTP has been running since 1982. It survived the dot-com bust, the move to mobile, the move to cloud, and every Cloudflare outage that takes out half the web. Your inbox still works when everything else is on fire.
Yes, I use Resend to send the alerts. Yes, Resend could also go down. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of monitoring dependencies while depending on dependencies.
It's dependencies all the way down.
At some point you pick a layer you trust and stand on it. I'm standing on email. It's been working for 43 years. I like those odds.
The part where I ask for your help
CanaryOps is live. Free tier gives you 10 monitors with 5-minute checks and email alerts. No credit card, no trial that expires, no "contact sales."
Pro is $9/month for 50 monitors and 1-minute checks. That's less than the mass-produced sandwich you bought for lunch.
I'm a solo dev. No funding, no team, no marketing department (as you can probably tell from this post). I built this because I needed it, and I'm betting other developers need it too.
What I actually want from you:
- Try it → canaryops.dev
- Tell me what's broken
- Tell me what APIs to add to the preset list
- Tell me if the value prop makes sense or if I'm yelling into the void
The thesis
The question isn't whether your dependencies will go down. They will. More often than last year, and the year before that.
The question is whether you'll know before your Slack lights up with user complaints.
Status pages are self-reported. They update when providers decide to admit something's wrong. That's not monitoring — that's PR.
You deserve to know before the status page does.
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