You open Discord, and nothing loads. Before you start restarting your router or reinstalling the app, there is one thing worth knowing: the problem might have nothing to do with you.
Websites go down all the time — for minutes, sometimes hours. But the experience from a user's perspective is identical whether the site is globally unreachable or your own DNS resolver is misbehaving. Both look like a blank screen.
What a server-side check actually tells you
When you run a check on WebsiteDown, we send an HTTP request directly from our infrastructure to the target server. This bypasses your browser, your ISP, your local DNS cache, and any VPN you might be running.
If that request fails — timeout, connection refused, 5xx response — the site is down from our vantage point. That is as close to an objective answer as you can get without running your own global probe network.
If the request succeeds but you still cannot load the site, the issue is somewhere in your local stack: DNS, routing, your ISP, or your device.
Why this distinction matters
Knowing whether a site is globally down changes what you do next.
If it is down globally: you wait. No troubleshooting will help. Check their official status page, look at community reports, and save your time.
If it is only down for you: the fix could be as simple as clearing your DNS cache, switching networks, or disabling a browser extension. These take minutes and often solve the problem immediately.
Chasing a local fix when the problem is global is one of the most common time-wasters in tech support. And chasing a global fix when the problem is local is equally frustrating.
The AI intelligence layer
HTTP reachability is a binary signal — up or down. But many outages are more nuanced. A site might be technically reachable but showing errors on login, running slowly, or failing only for users in certain regions.
That is why WebsiteDown layers AI-powered web intelligence on top of the server probe. By scanning social media, official status pages, and news sources in real time, we can surface things the HTTP check cannot see: login systems failing, CDN issues in specific regions, database degradation affecting a subset of requests.
A site that returns 200 OK is not necessarily healthy. A site that returns 200 with 45,000 people simultaneously reporting it is broken is clearly having a bad day.
The fast answer
When you are staring at a broken website and need to know immediately: go to WebsiteDown, type the domain, and click Check. You will have a server-side verdict in seconds, plus any AI-detected signals from across the web.
If the site is down globally, share the result. If it is just you, start with flushing your DNS cache.