Substack

Substack arrived at precisely the moment that a significant portion of the journalism and media industry was reconsidering its relationship with algorithmic platforms. Founded in 2017, it offered writers a simple proposition: own your subscriber list, charge directly for access, and keep the relationship with your audience rather than ceding it to a social network. The timing was fortuitous — the mid-2010s disillusionment with Facebook's organic reach collapse and the growth of creator economies created fertile ground. By the early 2020s Substack had signed up some of the most prominent names in media and counted millions of paying subscribers across its publications.

Substack operates as both a publishing platform and a payment processor, handling subscription billing on behalf of thousands of independent writers. Its infrastructure serves writer dashboards, subscriber email delivery at scale, web archives of posts, the Substack app for reading, and the social "Notes" feature introduced in 2023. Email deliverability is central to the Substack value proposition — a writer's ability to reach subscribers depends entirely on Substack's sending infrastructure and its relationships with email providers who decide what lands in inboxes versus spam folders.

Substack problems affect both writers and readers in distinct ways. Email delivery failures mean newsletters never arrive in subscribers' inboxes — a critical problem when writers' income depends on open rates and engagement with those emails. The writer dashboard becomes inaccessible during backend outages, preventing post scheduling or publication. Subscriber payment processing failures can interrupt subscription renewals, causing churn that would not otherwise occur. The Substack app on iOS and Android sometimes fails to load publication feeds or display individual posts when the content delivery backend is degraded. Notes posting and real-time social interactions fail independently of the newsletter product during partial outages.

Outage.gg monitors Substack platform status with real-time community reports. If Substack emails are not delivering, the dashboard is down, or the app is not loading, the live status page shows current impact from writers and readers.