Pusher

Pusher solved the real-time web problem before WebSockets were reliably supported across browsers and server frameworks, providing a hosted pub/sub infrastructure that applications could use to push live updates to connected clients without polling. The Channels product — the original offering — provides WebSocket-based messaging with fallback to HTTP long-polling for environments where WebSocket connections are blocked. Pusher Beams adds mobile push notification delivery for iOS and Android. Together, these products serve the real-time functionality in live dashboards, multiplayer features, chat applications, collaborative tools, and notification systems across tens of thousands of applications.

The Channels architecture maintains persistent WebSocket connections between client SDKs and Pusher's server infrastructure. Events published to a channel are broadcast to all connected subscribers in near real time, with the Pusher cluster managing connection state, channel membership, and event fanout. Presence channels add a membership tracking dimension where clients can observe who else is connected to a channel in real time. The client SDK handles reconnection logic when connections are dropped, but reconnection depends on the Pusher servers being available — a prolonged outage causes clients to cycle through reconnection attempts without success, and events published during the outage window are not reliably delivered to clients once they reconnect.

When Pusher has infrastructure problems, real-time application features stop working in highly visible ways. Chat messages stop appearing. Collaborative document cursors freeze. Dashboard counters stop updating. Live score feeds pause. The failure is noticeable to end users within seconds because the expectation of real-time updates is intrinsic to the feature's value — a dashboard that refreshes every thirty seconds is not a real-time dashboard. The Pusher debug console — accessible through the platform dashboard — which shows real-time event flow for debugging, becomes unavailable during control plane incidents, removing the primary tool developers would use to diagnose the problem.

Outage.gg monitors Pusher service status through community reports from developers. If WebSocket connections are failing, events are not being delivered, or mobile push is not working, the live status page shows current incident data from the Pusher user community.