How to check if a website is down (and whether it's just you)

A site that won’t load has two possible problems: the site, or everything between you and it. The fastest way to tell them apart is to change one thing at a time. Work through these in order — each one takes seconds.

Is it down for everyone, or just you?

Load the site on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off. That swaps your network, your DNS resolver, and your machine in one move. If the site loads over mobile data, the site is fine and the problem is on your side — usually DNS cache, a VPN, a proxy, or your office network.

If you don’t have a second network handy, a public checker works too, but treat it as one data point, not a verdict: many only test from a single location.

Does the name still resolve?

Ask DNS directly, bypassing your own cache:

dig example.com @1.1.1.1 +short

No answer means the problem is upstream of the server — an expired domain, a broken DNS record, or a nameserver outage. An answer that looks wrong (an IP you don’t recognize can still be normal behind a CDN) is worth comparing against a second resolver:

dig example.com @8.8.8.8 +short

If both return nothing, stop here: no server change will fix a name that doesn’t resolve.

Does the server answer at all?

Request just the headers:

curl -sI https://example.com

Three outcomes, three different problems:

• A status line comes back (HTTP/2 200, 301, 502, anything) — the server is reachable. The site may still be broken, but the network path isn’t the issue. Read the status code: 5xx means the server or something behind it is failing; 4xx means it answered and refused.
• Could not resolve host — DNS again; go back one step.
• A hang, then a timeout — the server or its network is unreachable. A firewall, a dead machine, or an outage at the host.

TLS errors (certificate has expired, handshake failures) sit in between: the server is up, but its certificate isn’t. Browsers will refuse the site even though the machine behind it is running.

Is it only down from some places?

A site can be up in Europe and unreachable from Asia — routing problems, regional CDN failures, and geo-blocking all look like “down” to the people affected. This is the one check you can’t do properly from a single laptop: you need vantage points in different regions, checking on a schedule, so you also know when it started.

That’s the part worth automating. YoPingMe checks your site from Frankfurt, Virginia, and Singapore and only alerts — by email, webhook, or Slack — when all three regions agree it’s actually down, so one flaky network path doesn’t page you. The free plan covers 10 monitors, and the first check runs while you sign up.