How to Check If a Website Is Down

Down for everyone, or just you?

A site can be unreachable for you while working fine elsewhere — a bad local DNS cache, an ISP routing issue, a firewall, or a VPN can all block a host that is perfectly healthy. Testing from several independent locations removes your own network from the equation.

Run an HTTP Check from multiple probe locations. If every location returns a 200, the site is up and the fault is local. If every location times out or errors, the outage is real.

Work through the layers

Check from the outside in — each layer rules out a class of problem:

• DNS: does the domain still resolve to an IP? A missing or wrong record means nothing else can work.
• Ping / TCP: is the server reachable at all, and is the web port (80/443) accepting connections?
• HTTP: does the server return a status code, and is it a healthy 2xx or an error like 5xx?

Read the failure mode

• DNS fails to resolve → domain expired, DNS provider outage, or a bad record change.
• DNS resolves but TCP/ping times out → server down, network route broken, or a firewall dropping traffic.
• TCP connects but HTTP returns 5xx → the server is up but the application or a backend is failing.
• HTTP returns 4xx → the server works; the specific page or permission is the issue.

Fix it or wait it out

If it's your site, the failure mode above points straight at the layer to fix. If it's someone else's, confirming it's down for everyone means the only thing to do is wait — or report it to the operator with the evidence from your multi-location test.