Is it down for everyone, or just me?

UPDATED JULY 2026 · 5 MIN READ

It's the first question anyone asks when a site won't load, and it's the right one — because the two answers point in opposite directions. If a site is down for everyone, there is nothing you can do but wait. If it's down just for you, the fix is on your end and usually takes a minute. Telling them apart is the whole game.

The trick is simple: you can't judge whether a site is down for everyone by looking at it from your own network. You have to check it from outside your connection.

The 10-second version

Ask a computer on a different network to load the site for you and compare. That's exactly what our test does — it checks the website from a neutral server on the internet's edge at the same moment it measures your own connection. If the edge reaches the site fine but your line can't, it's just you. If the edge can't reach it either, it's down for everyone. One verdict, no interpretation.

Three ways to check it yourself

1. Open it on mobile data. Turn Wi-Fi off on your phone and load the site over 4G/5G. This is the cleanest home test there is: a different device, a different provider, a different route. Still broken? It's very likely the site. Works fine? The problem is your home network.
2. Check a live status page. A monitor that probes the site from its own servers — like our status pages for popular services — tells you whether the site is responding from the outside world, independent of your connection.
3. Look for a pattern, not a rumor. Outage-report sites and social posts can confirm a big, widespread failure, but they're noisy: a handful of complaints during an evening could just be a lot of people with the same local Wi-Fi issue. Treat them as a hint, not proof.

If it's down just for you

This is the more common case, and the good news is it's fixable. When one site (or every site) fails only on your connection while the outside world reaches it fine, the suspect list is short:

• Wi-Fi or router. A quick, proper router restart clears a surprising share of these.
• DNS. If the site simply "can't be found" while others load, your name lookups may be failing — see is it your DNS?
• A stale cache. Try the site in a private/incognito window, or hard-refresh.
• Your ISP's route. Occasionally a provider has a bad path to one specific service while everything else works. That one's on them to fix, but it's rare.

If it's down for everyone

Then relax — this is the outcome that requires nothing from you. The site's own servers, database, or CDN are the problem, and their engineers are almost certainly already on it. Rebooting your router, clearing your cache, or refreshing forty times will change nothing. Instead, check the site's live status page to watch for recovery, and enjoy being the one person in the group chat who can prove it wasn't their Wi-Fi. Most outages resolve within minutes to a few hours.

The one catch: "up for everyone" isn't always "up for you"

A service can be perfectly healthy globally and still unreachable from where you sit — a regional ISP fault, a geo-block, or a broken route between your provider and theirs. That's why a single outside "it's up" isn't the end of the story. The most reliable answer comes from checking both ends together and comparing them, which is the whole reason testing both at once beats guessing.