Check a Website’s Status with ‘Down for Everyone or Just Me’

A TekRevue reader recently asked us about an odd situation: a website wouldn’t load on his work computer but worked fine at home. There was no error while at work, just a message from his browser that the site couldn’t be found.
At first he thought the website in question was simply unreliable and would go down often during the day. After some investigation, however, he learned that an issue with caching and DNS at his office’s Internet provider was the culprit. It wasn’t porn or gambling being blocked by a corporate network, it was just a configuration error unique to a particular network.
This can happen to anyone; the Internet’s vast web of interconnected servers aren’t always accessed properly by local Internet providers, and issues with DNS and filtering can cause a website to appear to be offline to an entire region of users.
If you find yourself in this situation, and you want a quick way to determine if a website is truly down or if it’s a problem with your local or wide area network, check out Down for Everyone or Just Me. This basic site has a simple yet powerful mission explained by its very name: it checks to see if a website is down for everyone, or just you.
Any time you can’t load a particular website, especially a large-scale site like Google that is known for having near-universal uptime, just head over to Down for Everyone, type in the site’s address and press Return/Enter.

Down for Everyone will then attempt to access the target site from its own server. If it can successfully load the website, it will let you know that the problem is “just you.”

If not, then it’s a good chance that the website is indeed down and it will let you know that as well.

We mention “good chance” above because, just as your Internet provider or local network may be experiencing errors, so too could Down for Everyone’s server. It’s therefore not 100 percent accurate, but it’s still a very quick and easy way to tell with 99 percent confidence if your network needs troubleshooting.
For a laugh, try using Down for Everyone to see if Down for Everyone is up.