You’ve clicked the link twice, pressed refresh a few more times, and the page still refuses to load. Before you restart the router, reboot the laptop, or start an argument with your internet provider, spend about a minute finding out where the problem actually lives. More often than you’d think, the answer is simple: it isn’t you at all — the site is down.
The trick is knowing which of those two situations you’re in before you start “fixing” anything. Fixing the wrong one wastes your evening; a couple of quick checks point you at the right one.
Try a different website before you touch anything
This is the fastest isolation test there is, and most people skip it. Open a big, boring site — google.com will do — in the same browser.
If it loads fine while your site won’t, your internet connection is working. The problem belongs to the site, not to you. One test, five seconds, and you’ve just saved yourself half an hour of pointless router-restarting.
The reverse is equally useful: if nothing loads anywhere — no websites, no apps updating, nothing — then the site isn’t the story. Your connection is. That’s a different problem, and our walkthrough on why video calls freeze even when downloads seem fast covers the upload side of a struggling connection, which is where a lot of these issues hide.
The one-minute check: is everyone else seeing this?
When one site is down but everything else works, the next question is whether it’s down for everyone or just for you. The quickest way to find out is Downdetector. Type the name of the service — your bank, a social network, a streaming app — and look at the graph.
What you’re looking at is a 24-hour chart of user reports. Downdetector compares the current volume of “I have a problem” reports against what’s normal for that time of day. A steep spike means a lot of people are reporting trouble right now, which is a strong signal that something is genuinely broken.
But treat it as a signal, not proof. Those numbers are user-submitted reports, not an official headcount — some people report issues that are actually local to their own device or network, and most people who are affected never report anything. For confirmation, check the company’s own status page: Google runs a Workspace Status Dashboard, Microsoft has a service health page, and most large services keep some version of one. The status page is where the company itself says what’s broken, what’s being fixed, and what’s back.
If it’s down for everyone, the best fix is patience
There’s genuinely nothing to repair on your end. Hammering refresh won’t bring the servers back any sooner, and restarting your equipment won’t help either.
Keep one tab on the official status page and check back later. And while you’re searching for updates, be careful: outages attract lookalike “status checker” pages and social-media posts that ask you to log in or download a “fix”. A real status page never needs your password. Most genuine outages are resolved within a few hours, and the status page is the first place that says so.
If it’s just you, work through these in order
No spike on Downdetector and every other site works fine? Then the problem is somewhere between the site and your device. Work through this list in order — each step takes seconds, and most people find the culprit before the end.
1. Try your phone on mobile data. Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and load the site over your data connection. If it loads, the site is fine and something in your home network is getting in the way.
2. Hard-refresh the page. Your browser may be showing you a stale, broken copy of the page from its cache rather than fetching a fresh one. On Windows press Ctrl + Shift + R (or Ctrl + F5); on a Mac press Cmd + Shift + R. That forces a full reload.
3. Try a private window. Open an incognito or private window and load the site there. Private windows run without your extensions, so if the site suddenly works, one of your extensions — usually an ad blocker or privacy add-on — is the culprit. Disable them one at a time to find it.
4. Clear that one site’s saved data. Corrupted cookies or a mangled cache for a single site can stop it loading while everything else works. In Chrome: click the padlock/tune icon in the address bar, choose “Cookies and site data”, and delete it for that site only. You don’t need to wipe your whole browser. (If you’re on Android and the word “clear” makes you nervous, our cache vs storage guide explains exactly what each button removes.)
5. Flush your DNS cache. Sometimes your device has remembered a bad address for the site. In Chrome, type chrome://net-internals/#dns in the address bar and click “Clear host cache”. On Windows, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig /flushdns. On a Mac, open Terminal and run sudo dscacheutil -flushcache (you’ll be asked for your admin password).
6. Check your device’s date and time. This one surprises people. If your clock is wrong by enough, secure websites refuse to load because their security certificates don’t look valid yet — the browser will usually say something about your clock being behind. Make sure “set automatically” is switched on.
7. Restart the router — last, not first. If you’ve reached this step, the problem really is on your side of things, and a router restart is now a sensible move rather than a guess. Unplug it, wait about thirty seconds, plug it back in, and give it a few minutes to reconnect.
Read the error message — it’s trying to tell you something
Browser error pages look cryptic, but most of them are plain English wearing a costume:
- “This site can’t be reached” or “took too long to respond” — your browser got no answer from the server. If Downdetector shows a spike, this is the outage you’re seeing.
- “ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED” or anything about DNS — the browser couldn’t translate the site’s address into a location. The DNS flush above is the fix to try.
- Certificate errors or “your clock is behind” — check your date and time, as above. Don’t click through certificate warnings on sites where you log in.
- An error page from the site itself — often a 500 number — you reached the site, but its own server is broken. That’s a them-problem. Wait it out.
Worth remembering next time
Almost every “the site won’t load” moment resolves into one of two buckets: their problem or your problem. The different-site test puts you in the right bucket in seconds, Downdetector tells you whether the crowd agrees with you, and the ordered checklist above handles the rest without any guesswork. Once you’ve done it twice, the whole thing takes less time than rebooting your router used to.
For more ways to understand what’s happening between your devices and the internet, browse our Internet Guides.
