Down For Everyone Or Just Me: The One-Question Website

Down For Everyone Or Just Me exists to settle a specific argument you have with yourself roughly once a month. A site will not load. Is the site broken, or is your internet quietly falling apart? You type the domain into one box. It tells you. That is the entire product, and it has been the entire product for well over a decade.

What is Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

The premise is almost insultingly simple. Your browser cannot reach a website. From where you are sitting, that looks identical whether the cause is a failed data center on another continent or a DNS setting your roommate changed. You have no way to tell the difference from inside your own network.

So the site checks from outside it. You give it a domain, it makes a request from its own servers, and it reports whether it got a response. Two possible outcomes, phrased in plain language: it is down for everyone, or it is just you.

That second answer is the valuable one. “It’s just you” is not a shrug, it is a diagnosis. It narrows an unbounded problem down to a short list of local suspects: your DNS resolver, a browser extension gone rogue, a VPN routing you somewhere strange, a captive portal you never logged into, an ISP peering issue, or a cached record pointing at an address that no longer exists.

The name is the other half of the appeal. It is a question, spelled out, in the URL bar. There is no branding exercise to decode, no tagline about empowering connectivity. You read the domain and you already know what the site does, which is a trick almost nobody else manages.

It has also become a small piece of internet furniture. When a large service goes dark, the reflex sequence for a certain kind of person is: refresh, check the status page, check social media, and check this. It is the second opinion you consult before admitting the problem might be your own router.

What can you do with Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

• Check a single domain instantly. Type it in, press enter, get a verdict. No account, no captcha, no interstitial.
• Rule out your own network. A positive result means the site is alive and the fault is local, which is the fastest way to stop blaming the wrong thing.
• Confirm an outage before reporting it. Handy when you are about to tell a colleague that a service is broken and would prefer to be right.
• Test from a neutral vantage point. The check runs from the service’s servers, not your machine, so it bypasses your DNS, your VPN and your ISP entirely.
• Share the result. The check produces a URL you can hand to someone else, which saves a round of “works fine for me.”
• Use it on mobile. The page is basically text and a form, so it loads on the worst connection you have ever had.

Tips to get the most out of it

Enter the bare domain, not the deep link. The check works on the host, so example.com is what you want. Feeding it a long URL with query parameters usually just adds noise to a question that only needs the domain.

Treat “just you” as the start of the debugging, not the end. The next steps in order: try mobile data, try a different browser in private mode, flush your DNS cache, and disable the VPN. One of those four resolves it most of the time.

Remember that reachable is not the same as working. A site can answer an HTTP request perfectly while its login system, database or checkout is broken. This tool checks the front door, not the whole building.

Cross-check anything important. If you are diagnosing something that actually matters, run the same domain past a second checker or the operator’s own status page. Single-probe results can be misleading when a service is only partly degraded or failing in one region.

Bookmark it before you need it. The one time you want this site is the one time your search engine is also mysteriously refusing to load. A bookmark or a memorized domain beats troubleshooting a search box.

Do not overthink the name. There are several similarly-titled services floating around the web because the phrase is so obviously useful. They do roughly the same job. Pick one and stick with it.

If you like Down For Everyone Or Just Me, also try…

• The Useful Website: more single-purpose tools that answer exactly one question well.
• wttr.in: the weather in one request, with the same allergy to unnecessary interface.
• Blacklight by The Markup: point it at a URL and find out what that site is doing behind your back.
• Is It Friday Yet?: the purest expression of the one-question website genre.

Find more of the internet’s small, sharp instruments in Tools & Utilities, or wander into Weird & Wonderful for the sites that ask stranger questions.