How to Check if a Website Is Down (For Everyone or Just You)
A step-by-step guide to figuring out whether a website is actually down or the problem is only on your end — with the exact checks that take under 60 seconds.
A page won't load. Before you file a support ticket or restart your router for the third time, spend one minute running the checks below. In most cases you'll know within 60 seconds whether the issue is the website, your network, or your device.
1. Check the site on a status monitor first
Independent status pages ping the target from multiple locations, so they'll show whether real users elsewhere are also seeing failures. Search the service on Down For All Or Just Me — a red banner means our servers can't reach it either, and a green one means the problem is almost certainly local to you.
2. Try a different network
Switch your phone to mobile data (turn Wi-Fi off) and load the same URL. If it works on cellular but not Wi-Fi, the issue is your ISP, router, or DNS.
3. Bypass your DNS cache
Open the site in a private/incognito window. If it loads there, clear your browser cache. If it still fails, flush DNS:
- Windows:
ipconfig /flushdns - macOS:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder - Linux (systemd):
sudo resolvectl flush-caches
4. Try a different DNS resolver
Temporarily switch to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) DNS. Sometimes ISPs have stale or blocked records.
5. Check the outage map
Our live outages page shows every service our probes flagged as unreachable in the last check, plus a world map of where users are reporting problems. If your target isn't on either list, it's very likely a local issue.
What if it's really down?
If our probes confirm the outage and multiple users are reporting problems, there's nothing you can do to fix it — the fastest way to know when it's back is to bookmark the service's page here and refresh, since we re-probe every few minutes.
The 60-second checklist
- Search the service on Down For All Or Just Me
- Load the site over cellular data
- Open the page in an incognito window
- Flush DNS if the incognito test failed
- Switch to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 as your DNS resolver
Nine times out of ten, one of those five steps identifies the exact problem.
Last updated on July 1, 2026
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Ready to check if a specific service is down right now? Search on the home page or see the live outages.