Is it down for everyone, or just you? A 60-second diagnostic
A clean three-way split for diagnosing whether a website is genuinely down or only broken for you. Probe, status page, network isolation — in that order.
You hit refresh on a site three times. Nothing. Is it down for everyone, or just you? The answer changes everything you do next — and most people skip the diagnostic step and jump straight to restarting their router.
There's a clean three-way split that resolves almost every "is it down" question. Run through it in order and you'll know within 60 seconds whether the problem is the site, your network, or your device.
1. Probe the site from somewhere that isn't you
The first move is always: check the site from a vantage point that isn't your own computer. If a third-party probe says the site is up, you know your network or device is the issue. If the probe also fails, the site is genuinely unreachable — for you and for a server in another country.
Our Website Down Checker runs the probe from our infrastructure (not your browser) and reports DNS resolution, the HTTP status code, the redirect chain, certificate validity, the resolved IP's provider, and the domain's registration state — all in one shot.
The redirect chain and the registrar are the two things people miss most often. A domain in clientHold won't resolve anywhere — even if the website was working yesterday — and a redirect loop will look like a hang to you. Both are visible in the result panel.
2. Check the official status page
If the third-party probe also fails, the next step is to confirm with the service's own status page. Most major providers run Statuspage.io feeds (you'll see the familiar layout), and they post incident updates faster than user-report aggregators.
Our /aws page mirrors Amazon's public RSS feed in real time, and every service status page on this site shows the upstream Statuspage indicator alongside our own probe data.
Cross-checking the two gives a far better signal than either alone — official feeds sometimes lag by 10–20 minutes, and our probes catch issues that haven't been acknowledged yet.
3. Test your own network in isolation
If the probe passes but you still can't reach the site, the issue is local. The fastest way to confirm is to switch networks: hotspot from your phone (mobile data, completely separate from your Wi-Fi). If the site loads on hotspot, the problem is your Wi-Fi, your router, your ISP, or your DNS resolver — not the site.
Once you know it's local, the order of suspicion is:
- Browser cache — open an incognito window. Rules out cached error pages and stale assets.
- DNS resolver — switch to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 at the OS level. Rules out a misbehaving ISP resolver.
- VPN — turn off any VPN extension or system VPN. CDNs sometimes refuse known VPN exits.
- Router — restart it. This is the last step, not the first.
Restarting your router clears any local debugging signal. If you reach for it before isolating with hotspot or switching DNS, you've thrown away the data you need to know what was actually wrong.
The shortcut
Three steps, in order: third-party probe, official status, isolate your network. The Website Down Checker collapses steps 1 and 2 into one page. Step 3 you do on your phone.
Most "the internet is broken" moments resolve at step 1.