When a webpage you need does not open, it is often difficult to find out what the status is. Is this just a local outage? Or is the website down for everyone? We list up four helpful services and one option to create a custom dashboard for yourself.
We have all become quite used to services being available, for multiple purposes. We usually notice how much we rely on the availability when the web service is down. When the webpage won’t open to show us our mails. Or when the scheduled conference call can not be attended because another service does not accept the credentials. And so on.
The first question always is: Is this a local problem or is the site down for everyone? If it is down, what is the reason? And even more importantly: How long will the outage be? “Is it down right now – or is it just me” is actually a search term you find listed on Google when you start searching for „down right now“.
But how do you get the information you would need? Many big services have by now installed „status boards“ in order to inform users about the most current availability. Plus, many service and customer care departments are out on Twitter and would potentially respond to user inquiries. This though might take a while, for example until internally it is verified what the reason for an outage is.
As a quick remedy, we have listed up below the best status boards you can check. Some of them have very similar names, but very different levels information. Make sure to check all of them out briefly, in order to get an overview. As an extra tip: Most of the services below have regular updates both on Facebook and Twitter. So by following them you might be able to detect an outage or service disruption before you actually try to acces the service.
Sites providing an uptime checks
Down for everyone or just me?
Simple service, which let’s you determine whether an unavailable site is just down for you (locally) or for everyone. The service will though not link further, so you won’t get any information as to the cause of an outage, nor how long it might take.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Is it down right now?
This website comes with a list of big websites and has sublists for services which are currently not available. Plus, many local services will not be checked. This is only for websites and services provided via the internet.
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/
Down Right now?
Downdetector.com
This service monitors offers a free and a paid pro version. There are overviews and for many services easy to understand charts which show the duration of an outage and the number of reports “Downdetector.com” has received from users (using a mixed approach of measuring and reporting from users). For the pro version “Downdetector.com” monitors 2600 services from 27 countries.
Downdetector, in our experience, has the easiest to understand visualization about downtime of a given site, here for example for TimeWarner Cable. You can quite easily see the volume of user reported problems in a line chart. There are facets such as from where outage reports came in – which is helpful for telephone and cable services, where outages might only occur in a specific region. On the right side of the chart there is an outage map, which provides easy overview which regions might be affected.
What is helpful is that the URL structure for services monitored is easy to remember: Downdetector.com/status/NAME OF SERVICE gets you right to the needed info, if you suspect that particular service is down.
Some examples (not necessarily indicating there have been outages):
https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable
https://downdetector.com/status/pinterest
https://downdetector.com/status/level3
Panic Status Board
Should you want to build your very own „status board“ there is an app for that, too. Available for IOs, the Panic status board is very easy to set-up for iPads and can be displayed on larger screens, too. You need to purchase the app for 9,95 US-Dollars once, the test version allows initial reporting for free. The status board will not only work for outages – you can list up information like who is in the office today (based on a calendar feed) or have an overview of visits and pageviews to your homepage. A sidenote: The agency behind this app is actually called „Panic“ – though the status board release has made them popular and well known.
https://panic.com/statusboard/







