Is the website down for everyone or just me?

Why a multi-location check settles it

A request from your laptop passes through your browser cache, your operating system's DNS resolver, your router, your ISP, and only then reaches the internet path to the server. Any of those layers can fail on its own while the server is perfectly healthy. Run the same request from a checkpoint in another country and none of your local layers are involved. If it fails there too, the problem is at the destination. If it succeeds, the problem sits between you and the internet, and the search has narrowed from the whole world to your own machine and network.

Running it from more than one location adds a third possible answer, and it is a common one: the site is up in some places and down in others. That pattern points at a regional network route, a CDN edge, a geo-block, or a DNS change that has reached some resolvers and not others, and not at the server being off.

What is usually wrong when it is only you

• Stale DNS cache. Your resolver or your operating system still holds an old IP address for the domain, so you are connecting to a server that has moved.
• Your ISP or the route to the host. A broken peering link or a routing problem affects everyone on that provider and nobody else.
• VPN or corporate proxy. Traffic leaves from somewhere else entirely, and that exit point may be blocked, filtered or simply slow.
• The hosts file. An entry added months ago during testing still overrides real DNS, usually pointing at a machine that is no longer there.
• Browser cache, service worker or an extension. A cached error page, a stale service worker or a content blocker can make a working page look dead.
• Local firewall or security software. Some suites block whole categories of sites, or block a port the site needs.
• An expired or untrusted certificate on your machine only. A wrong system clock makes every valid certificate look expired.

How to check from another network

The quickest manual test needs no tools at all. Turn Wi-Fi off on your phone and open the site over mobile data: different network, different DNS resolver. If it loads there and not on your laptop, the fault is local.

From a terminal, ask for the headers directly, then ask a public resolver what IP it thinks the domain has:

curl -I -sS --max-time 10 https://example.com/
dig +short example.com @8.8.8.8
dig +short example.com

The first line tells you whether a server answered at all, and with which status code. If curl reports a connection timeout or a DNS failure, nothing answered. If the two dig lines disagree, your local resolver is holding a different address than the public one, and a stale cache is the likely culprit. On Windows, ipconfig /flushdns clears the local cache; on macOS, sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; on most Linux systems, restarting the resolver service does it.

What each outcome means

• Down everywhere. The server, its hosting, or its DNS is genuinely broken. Look at the status code: a 502 or 503 means something answered and the application behind it did not, which is very different from no answer at all.
• Down in some places only. Suspect DNS that has not finished updating everywhere, a CDN edge or region with a problem, or a firewall rule that blocks certain networks or countries.
• Up everywhere but not for you. Work through the local causes above, starting with DNS and the VPN.
• Up, but slow everywhere. Not an outage. It often comes before one, so measure it properly rather than guessing.

One detail trips people up. A site can be "up" in the sense that it returns a page and still be broken for visitors: a check that only looks for a response counts a database error page as a success when the server returns it with a 200. Look at what came back, not only at whether something came back.

Finding out before a customer does

A one-off check answers the question you have right now, and only because you thought to ask it. Outages that start at three in the morning, or that only affect one region, are usually found by a customer first. Scheduled monitoring runs the same check continuously from many locations and tells you the moment the result changes, with the location and the error attached. HostTracker runs those checks from 300+ checkpoints in 158 cities and alerts by email, SMS, voice call, Slack, Telegram and more, so a regional failure looks different from a global one on the first alert. The website down checker gives you a site's status right now. If the site answers but answers slowly, measure it properly: server response time.