Website downtime
Everything on this site starts from one question: Is the problem the website, or is it you? This hub answers it properly.
Most of the time a site that will not load is not down. It is being blocked, cached badly, resolved to the wrong address, or throttled - And each of those has a different fix that takes seconds once you know which one you are looking at.
The articles below work outward from that first question. They cover how to confirm an outage, what the common failure modes look like from the outside, how long outages usually last, and what you can reasonably expect a company to do about it.
If you are not sure where to start, is it down for everyone, or just you? is the one most people need first, and why websites go down follows on from it directly. If you would rather just find out whether a particular site is working, check it from our servers or look at what is failing right now.
All 8 guides in website downtime
Is it down for everyone, or just you?
A practical order of tests for working out whether a website is genuinely down or the problem is on your side - And what each result rules out.
Why websites go down
The real causes of website outages - Configuration pushes, BGP withdrawals, expired certificates and dependency cascades.
How long do outages last?
Typical outage durations by cause, why most incidents resolve in minutes, and the warning signs that an outage is going to be a long one.
Partial outages
Why most real outages are partial, how regional and feature-level failures hide from monitoring, and how to tell what is actually broken.
What to do when a website is down
A practical order of actions during an outage, including the three things that reliably make the situation worse.
Maintenance or outage?
How to distinguish planned maintenance from an unplanned outage, why some services take themselves offline deliberately, and where the schedules are.
Is the internet down?
What makes it feel like the entire internet is down, the four failures that actually cause it, and how to identify which one you are looking at.
Down today, or gone for good?
How to tell a temporary outage from a genuine shutdown announcement, why shutdown rumours spread, and how to verify one in a couple of minutes.