Site not loading: is it down for everyone or just you
We check the service from both sides at once — from your browser and from our server. Comparing the two answers is what shows where the problem actually is.
Your browser will contact each service directly, and our server will do the same from its side. The check does not start on its own: requests to third-party sites should happen because you decided so, not because a page opened.
We do not store which service you checked. Our server's answer is the same for every visitor and refreshes on a timer.
Check your own address
Enter a site address — we will open it from our side and compare with what happened on yours. Only ordinary sites on ports 80 and 443 are checked; addresses inside a local network are not reachable.
Why one measurement is not enough
When a site will not open there are exactly two possibilities: the site itself is down, or your particular connection does not reach it. From inside a browser both look identical — a blank page and a connection error — and that page cannot tell them apart.
So the check runs from two sides. Your browser contacts the service itself, and our server does the same from a different network with a different address. If it opens for us but not for you, the problem is on the path from you to the service. If it opens for nobody, the service itself is at fault and there is nothing to route around.
What «unavailable only for you» means
It does not necessarily mean your provider blocked it. The same result comes from a filtered corporate Wi-Fi, parental controls on a router, an antivirus inspecting traffic, a broken DNS resolver at your provider, or a regional restriction set by the service itself.
Checking neighbouring services helps tell these apart. If one service out of ten is unavailable, the cause is usually that service or a narrow restriction. If several large ones dropped at once, the cause is shared and sits closer to you — in the network you are connected to.
Why a service can flicker
Large services do not run on one server but across dozens of sites worldwide, and different users land on different ones. Availability is therefore often partial: it works for your neighbour but not for you, and an hour later the other way round.
For the same reason a repeat check a few minutes later can give a different answer. That is not a fault in the tool: it reports the state at the moment of measurement, not a verdict. If the result jumps around, run it several times and look at the whole picture.
How this differs from services like Downdetector
Those services collect user complaints: the more people press «not working for me», the taller the bar. That shows sentiment rather than fact — complaints spike without outages, and a quiet nighttime failure barely shows up at all.
Nothing is collected from other people here. Every run performs two real requests — one from your browser, one from our server — and the answer is built only from those. The result therefore concerns your own connection, not an average one.
Frequently asked questions
When the service works, but not for you
MeerGuard changes the route to the service, and with it where you appear to be. It does not affect the service's own problems — only the path to it.