Check if a website or service is down right now. Real-time status monitoring for 1765+ services including YouTube, Discord, Netflix, AWS, and more.
It happens without warning. You're mid-stream on Netflix, and the screen goes black. Discord won't connect. Gmail shows a spinning icon that refuses to stop. Your first instinct is to check your Wi-Fi, restart your router, maybe even restart your computer. But the problem isn't on your end — the service itself is down, and millions of people are experiencing the exact same thing at the exact same moment.
The phrase "is it down" is one of the most searched queries on the internet, and it spikes by 10x to 50x during major outages. When YouTube goes dark, over a million people search "is YouTube down" within the first five minutes. When AWS has issues, half the internet breaks, and the other half scrambles to figure out why.
The problem? Most people waste 5 to 15 minutes trying to diagnose the issue themselves before realizing the service is simply down. That's time you don't need to waste.
Our real-time status checker monitors 1,765+ services across 8 categories with 6 granular status levels — and it gives you a clear answer in under 5 seconds. No sign-up, no ads cluttering your screen, no ambiguity. Here's everything you need to know about checking service status like a pro.
The fastest path to an answer takes three steps:
Step 1: Rule out your own connection. Open a tab and load google.com or cloudflare.com. If those work, your internet is fine. The problem is the specific service you're trying to use.
Step 2: Check the service status. Head to our downdetector and search for the service. You'll see its current status — from fully operational to confirmed outage — along with recent report trends and a timeline showing when the issue started.
Step 3: Look at the pattern. If the status page shows a spike in reports starting 10 minutes ago and the status is "degraded" or "major outage," you've got your answer. It's not you. Sit tight.
That's it. No guessing, no forum-scrolling, no asking Twitter if anyone else is having problems.
One of the most frustrating things about outage checking is having to visit different tools for different services. Our status checker covers virtually everything you use online, organized into 8 categories:
When social media goes down, you notice immediately — and so does everyone else. We track all major platforms:
Check the full list at akousa.net/downdetector and filter by the Social Media category.
Nothing stings quite like a streaming outage during a season finale:
Gamers are often the first to notice outages because the impact is immediate — you get kicked from a match or can't connect to servers:
These are the services that, when they go down, take thousands of other websites with them:
When banking services go down, it's not just inconvenient — it's genuinely stressful:
Sometimes the problem isn't the website — it's your internet provider:
Outages here mean lost productivity for millions of workers:
When shopping and delivery services go down, the impact is measured in lost revenue:
Not all outages are created equal. A slow-loading page is very different from a complete service failure. That's why our status checker uses 6 distinct levels instead of a simple "up or down" binary:
| Status Level | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Operational | Service is fully functional. No significant reports. |
| Minor Issues | Some users reporting problems, but the service is mostly working. Could be regional. |
| Degraded Performance | Service is accessible but noticeably slower or partially broken. Some features may be unavailable. |
| Partial Outage | Significant portion of users affected. Core functionality may be impaired. |
| Major Outage | Widespread failure. Most users cannot access the service. |
| Complete Outage | Service is entirely unreachable. Confirmed down for all users. |
This granularity matters. "Is YouTube down?" might mean "yes, video uploads are broken, but watching works fine." Our 6-level system captures that nuance instead of giving you a misleading all-or-nothing answer.
You might wonder how a status checker knows a service is down before the company itself acknowledges it. The answer is aggregated user reports combined with automated monitoring:
Report aggregation. When users experience issues, they report them. A handful of reports in an hour is noise — normal internet hiccups. But when hundreds or thousands of reports flood in within a 5-minute window, that's a clear signal of a real outage.
Pattern recognition. Outages have signatures. A DNS failure looks different from an API outage, which looks different from a CDN failure. The pattern of affected regions, the speed of report escalation, and the types of errors reported all contribute to accurate status assessment.
Multi-tier caching. Speed matters during outages because that's when traffic spikes hardest. Our system uses a 3-tier cache architecture to ensure the status page loads instantly even when millions of users are checking simultaneously. The irony of a status checker going down during an outage isn't lost on anyone, so this is engineered to handle extreme traffic.
Continuous updates. Status isn't checked once and cached for hours. The data refreshes continuously, so what you see reflects the current state — not what was true 30 minutes ago.
One of the most useful features in our downdetector is the historical timeline. It doesn't just tell you if a service is down now — it shows you the pattern, which tells you a lot more than a simple status badge.
Spike and recovery. The most common pattern. Reports spike sharply, stay elevated for 15 to 90 minutes, then drop back to baseline. This is a typical server issue or deployment gone wrong. The company identifies the problem, rolls back or fixes it, and the service recovers. Usually nothing to worry about long-term.
Gradual degradation. Reports increase slowly over hours rather than spiking. This often indicates a capacity problem — the service is getting overwhelmed by traffic rather than experiencing a discrete failure. Common during product launches, major events, or viral moments.
Rolling regional outages. Reports spike in one region, recover, then spike in another. This typically means the company is performing maintenance or the issue is propagating through their infrastructure. If you're not affected yet, you might be soon.
Recurring patterns. The archive feature lets you look at historical data. If a service has outages every Tuesday morning, that's likely their maintenance window gone wrong. If it happens every month during peak hours, they have a scaling problem. This context is invaluable if you're deciding whether to depend on a service for something critical.
Knowing a service is down is step one. Here's what to do next:
Honestly? Just wait. Most outages resolve within 30 to 90 minutes. Bookmark the service's page on our downdetector and check back periodically. The timeline will show you when reports start declining, which means recovery is underway.
Find an alternative. If Gmail is down, use Outlook. If Slack is down, use Discord or Teams. If AWS is down... well, a lot of the internet is having a bad day, but services hosted on other clouds should still work.
Check the company's official status page. Most major services maintain one (status.github.com, status.aws.amazon.com, etc.). These are often slower to update than aggregated report tools, but they provide official detail about what's broken and estimated recovery times.
Use our VS comparison pages. Our downdetector includes comparison pages where you can compare the reliability history of two services side by side. This is useful when you're deciding between competing services and want to know which one has better uptime historically.
Communicate with your users. If your product depends on AWS or Stripe and they're down, your users need to know it's not your fault. Post a status update on your own channels proactively.
Document the incident. Note the start time, duration, and impact. This is useful for SLA claims, post-mortems, and decision-making about vendor diversity.
Consider redundancy. If a single cloud provider outage takes your entire product offline, that's an architecture decision worth revisiting. Multi-cloud, multi-region, and graceful degradation aren't just buzzwords — they're what separate products that survive outages from products that go down with the ship.
If you're experiencing issues with a service and our status page doesn't show an outage yet, you might be among the first to notice. Reporting matters because it contributes to the aggregated signal that helps everyone else.
Visit the service's page on our downdetector and submit a report. Include what you're experiencing if possible — login failures, loading errors, specific features that aren't working. Early reports with detail help establish the scope and nature of the outage faster.
The more people report, the faster the status reflects reality, and the fewer people waste time troubleshooting a problem that isn't on their end.
Our downdetector maintains an archive of historical outage data, and it's more useful than most people realize:
Evaluating service reliability. Before committing to a cloud provider, payment processor, or communication platform for your business, check its outage history. A service that had 12 significant outages in the past year is telling you something about its infrastructure maturity.
Identifying patterns. Some services have predictable outage windows — maintenance schedules, peak-hour bottlenecks, or recurring issues tied to specific features. The archive makes these patterns visible.
Correlating outages. When multiple services go down simultaneously, it usually points to a shared dependency — a cloud provider, a CDN, a DNS provider. The archive lets you see these correlations across services, which is invaluable for understanding the internet's hidden dependency chains.
Post-mortem context. If you're writing an incident report for your own service and need to document that a third-party dependency was down, the archive provides the timestamps and severity data you need.
Search data reveals which services cause the most panic when they go down. Here's what generates the biggest search spikes:
Every single one of these is monitored in real time on our status checker. If you're searching "is YouTube down" or "is Discord down" right now — go check. The answer is waiting for you.
Fair question. Here's why independent status checkers are more reliable during actual outages:
Companies are slow to acknowledge. Official status pages often show "All Systems Operational" for 15 to 30 minutes after an outage begins. There's an internal process — engineers confirm the issue, escalate it, draft a message, get approval to post. Meanwhile, our aggregated report system reflects the problem within minutes.
Scope can be misleading. A company might report "minor issues with API" when in reality the entire service is unusable for half their users. Independent monitoring based on real user reports gives you the ground truth.
Status pages can go down too. If the company's infrastructure is having a bad day, their status page might be hosted on the same infrastructure. An independent checker doesn't have that dependency.
You get cross-service visibility. When AWS goes down, you don't just need to know AWS is down — you need to know which of the services you use depend on AWS. Our platform shows you the broader impact because we monitor everything in one place.
Next time something doesn't load, skip the 10-minute troubleshooting rabbit hole. Head to our downdetector, search for the service, and get your answer in seconds. With 1,765+ services monitored across 8 categories, 6 status levels, historical archives, and comparison tools, it's the fastest way to know whether the problem is the service, the internet, or you.
Bookmark it. You'll need it sooner than you think.
Akousa