I always got the impression that downdetector worked by logging the number of times they get a hit for a particular service and using that as a heuristic to determine if something is down. If so, that's brilliant.
When Facebook's properties all went down in October, people were saying that AT&T and other cell phone carriers were also down - because they couldn't connect to FB/Insta/etc. There were even some media reports that cited Downdetector, seeming without understanding that they are basically crowdsourced and sometimes the crowd is wrong.
I think it's a bit simpler for AWS- there's a big red "I have a problem with AWS" button on that page. You click it, tell it what your problem is, and it logs a report. Unless that's what you were driving at and I missed it, it's early. Too early for AWS to be down :(
Some 3600 people have hit that button in the last ~15 minutes.
