In lieu of bringing back the immensely popular “Tool of the Month” blog, we’ve decided to switch to a different column theme with the same name. As the media world becomes increasingly complicated, a number of excellent tools are popping up all over the place – both online and offline – to help you navigate the digital landscape. We hope to offer you one or more tools per month that will truly help you out.
Here’s our inaugural inductee: Down for everyone, or just me?
Have you recently had difficulty loading a website that you need to access? Of course! Everyone has.
But most of the time, you’ll spend a few minutes waiting to see if the page will load, and you are left to wonder which problem you are facing? Could it be…
A. The internet has just gone down in your office
B. You are having trouble accessing that specific website
C. The website is down
D. All of the above….?
When you find yourself in this situation, check out downforeveryoneorjustforme.com
It’s a simple website that will tell you whether that website is loading for others or whether the problem is on your end. Definitely will save you some time on those frequent occasions when twitter shuts down for an hour.
Another option is downrightnow, built specifically for popular blog, email and social networking sites. We use crowdsourcing (user reports on the web site and on Twitter) and official company announcements to detect outages.
You can check the current status of Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail and other major web services and report a service issue at http://downrightnow.com/
Posted by: downrightnow | September 30, 2009 at 09:27 AM
A similar facility with more diagnostics is available at newsreports.org
Posted by: spenser | October 15, 2009 at 04:23 AM