Down for everyone, or just you?
When a site won’t load, the first question is whether it’s the site or your connection. This tool requests the URL from our server on Cloudflare’s network, follows up to 10 redirects and waits up to 15 seconds. If it loads here and not for you, the problem is local. If it fails here too, the site, or its DNS, is the problem.
What the verdicts mean
- Up. The server answered with a 2xx or 3xx status. We show the time to first byte and the final URL after redirects.
- Responding with an error. The server answered, but with a 4xx status: 404 (not found), 403 (forbidden, often bot protection) or 429 (too many requests). The site is up; this URL isn’t serving a page. We also use this verdict for redirect loops, chains of more than 10 redirects and redirects we won’t follow.
- Down. A 5xx status (the server or an upstream app failed), a timeout, or no connection at all. When nothing answers, we look up the domain’s DNS to tell a missing or expired domain (no A or AAAA records, or NXDOMAIN) apart from a server that isn’t responding.
If it’s up here but not for you
- Change the network. Switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data. If it loads, look at your router or provider.
- Take your browser out of it. Open a private window with extensions off. Ad blockers and VPNs can block sites.
- Suspect a stale address. Your device caches DNS answers, and so does your provider. After a site changes servers, Google’s own DNS guide says that if you changed your DNS configuration in the last 72 hours, you may need to wait for the change to propagate. The DNS propagation checker shows whether a DNS change has reached public resolvers.
- Check the exact address. www and non-www, http and https, and a deep path can behave differently. The final URL after redirects is shown under the result.
Common causes, and where to look
- 502, 503 or 504: the CDN or proxy is up but your app behind it isn’t. MDN says a 503 means the server isn’t ready to handle the request, commonly because of maintenance or overload. Check your host’s status page and app logs.
- Cloudflare 521, 522, 523 and 524: Cloudflare is answering and your origin server isn’t. It lists these as web server is down, connection timed out, origin is unreachable and a timeout occurred, and says to contact your hosting provider first.
- Timeouts: an overloaded server, a firewall dropping traffic, or a long-running request.
- No DNS records: an expired domain, changed nameservers, or a deleted record. The DNS lookup shows what’s there now.
- Redirect loops: often an http/https or www rule fighting with a CDN setting. The HTTP header checker shows every hop, and the HTTP status checker covers many URLs at once.
What downtime does to search
Google says 5xx and 429 responses make its crawlers temporarily slow down, and URLs that persistently return server errors are eventually removed from the index. When a site can’t be reached at all, it is quicker: already indexed URLs are removed within days. So a short blip costs crawling, and a multi-day outage can cost pages.
If you have to pause a site on purpose, Google’s guidance is to keep it online with limited functionality. If you must disable it for a day or two, return an informational page with a 503 status and a retry-after header. Google calls disabling a whole site an extreme measure for a few days at most. If it is your site, the Crawl Stats report in Search Console shows whether Google hit DNS, server or robots.txt problems in the last 90 days. See 5xx server error.
What this tool can’t tell you
It is one request from one place, made when you press the button. It doesn’t monitor over time or send alerts, so use an uptime monitoring service for that. A site behind a CDN can answer from cache while the app behind it fails, so “up” means this URL answered, not that logins and checkout work.