My website suddenly went down and every third-party tool I use is also offline. Is it me or is it the internet?
My website suddenly went down and every third-party tool I use is also offline.
Ask by Anubhav Sharma
Updated 13 Sep 2026
Before you touch a single server setting, check whether the outage is bigger than you. It is a strange feeling when your site, your payment gateway, your analytics dashboard, and your favourite grocery app all die at the same moment, but it happens more often than people think. A huge slice of the web sits behind a handful of infrastructure providers, and when one of them hiccups, thousands of unrelated services go dark together.
The fastest sanity check is to open an outage tracker like Downdetector, or just search the name of a big infrastructure provider (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure) along with the word 'down'. If the social media feeds are already full of complaints, relax a little. Your servers are probably fine and there is nothing to fix on your side except waiting.
If nothing global is reported, narrow it down. Can you reach your server by IP rather than domain name? If yes, it is a DNS issue. Can you ping it at all? If not, it is hosting or network. Does the site load but throw a 500 error? Then the application is at fault and your logs are the next stop.
The lesson I took from the last big outage: keep a status page that is hosted somewhere completely separate from your main stack. When everything else is on fire, that one page tells your customers you know and you are on it.