The site-down Live Activity

A Live Activity is the iOS surface for something that is happening right now. DomainGuard uses it for exactly one thing: one of your watched domains is down.

What starts it

The uptime probe marks a domain down on its second consecutive failed check and sends a push. The Live Activity is started by the app itself, not by the push: if the app is open when the push arrives it starts straight away, and otherwise it starts the next time you open the app, which checks the server for any outage the phone missed. The push itself is an ordinary alert, so it follows your Focus and notification settings. With One summary each morning on (the default), a site going down pushes straight away only between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern; outside those hours the push waits for the morning summary, and the Live Activity starts the next time you open the app.

What it shows

• The domain and how long it has been down.
• The server's own evidence line: the HTTP status or the error the probe saw.
• The last eight checks as a strip.
• When the next check is due (probes run every five minutes).

In the Dynamic Island the compact view shows the domain and the elapsed time; expanded, the same as the Lock Screen.

How it ends

When the probe sees a success, the domain recovers; when the app next receives the recovery push or is opened, it updates the activity to "Back online after n min", and the activity stays on the Lock Screen for four hours before dismissing itself. You can dismiss it earlier by swiping.

Requirements

Uptime push (notify_uptime_push) on, notifications allowed, and Live Activities allowed for DomainGuard in Settings. Free accounts get it for their three probed domains.

Common questions

Two domains down at once? One activity per domain; iOS shows them stacked.

The activity did not start but the alert arrived. Open the app: the activity is started by the app, so a phone that was locked when the alert came starts it on the next open. Live Activities also need the app to have been opened at least once since install, and iOS can decline to start one under low power or when too many are active. The alert feed and the push still carry the event.

Why it exists

An outage is the one event where knowing five minutes sooner matters, and where the person who finds out is usually a customer. The Live Activity puts the state where the phone already is: on the Lock Screen, without unlocking, with the evidence line that says whether it is a timeout, a 502 or a DNS failure, so the first call to the host is a specific one.