Why a 200 OK Response Is a Poor Indicator of Real Service Health

A developer building an outage tracker for Indian services found that checking for HTTP 200 responses is a fundamentally flawed way to monitor whether a service is actually working. A 200 status only confirms a server responded — it says nothing about whether core features like payments or logins are functioning correctly. Status codes such as 403, 429, and 504 carry distinct meanings that get lost when monitoring tools collapse all outcomes into a simple up-or-down verdict. CDN caching and error pages served with 200 status codes further obscure true service health. The developer concluded that crowd-sourced user reports are often a stronger signal than automated synthetic checks, since a real user cannot be wrong about their own transaction failing.