Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
It’s Not Me, It’s You — Getting the 411 on Website Outages
Given the open architecture and multitude of players involved in connecting you with a website, it’s a major technological achievement that the web works as often, and as well, as it does.
Except for when it doesn’t.
Now, we humans are funny. When something is broken, we like to fix it (or at least find out who’s to blame). But when it come to the web, there are so many potential points of failure that it’s hard to pin down the problem. Often, we assume that any issues are our own, such as wondering, “What happened to my cable provider?”
That doesn’t stop us from trying to fix the problem, of course, but right after you check that yes, your cable modem is plugged in: check the site outage reports.
Here’s a couple of ways of doing just that (if you can get to them, that is).
Downdetector.com
Downdetector.com lets you dig into outages on three levels. First, it keeps a running report of the most-impacted sites on its home page:
Clicking on any of the down sites yields a report with data and comments made by people experiencing the outage:
Click on the “Live Outage Map” link to see if you’re in one of the affected areas. It may take a few minutes to load, so be patient.
Once the map loads, you can zoom in to see if the outage covers your location.
CurrentlyDown.com
If you want to see if a specific site is down, then head on over to CurrentlyDown.com where you can run a search:
For this example, I’m searching for one online solution I use. After a few minutes, this was what I got:
And there you have it. Bummer.
You can also look for outages using CurrentlyDown’s long list of regularly-monitored websites:
While these tools won’t help you reconnect to sites that are down, at least you know that the issue isn’t on your end.
So, what’s next? Pick up your phone, sit back and spend your now free time blaming someone else for the fact that you can’t work.
At least that’s my plan.
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