Is it down for everyone or just me?
When a site won't load, the problem can be the site, your network or something in between. A website down checker requests the site from our servers, away from your connection, and shows what happened.
If it answers for us, the problem is likely on your side: a cached error, a browser extension, your network or a block in your country. If it fails for us too, the site really has a problem.
Where can a site fail?
Each step is timed: looking up the domain name, opening the connection, checking the certificate and waiting for the server's reply. A failure at DNS points to the domain or its name servers. A failure at the certificate points to SSL. An error code from the server points to the site itself.
What the status codes mean
200 means the page answered normally. 301 and 302 are redirects. 403 means access is refused, 404 means the page doesn't exist, 500 is a server error and 502, 503 and 504 usually mean the server or something in front of it is overloaded or down.
Know before your visitors do
This check answers one question, right now. Uptime Monitor checks your sites all the time, confirms an outage before it alerts you, and keeps a history you can show on a status page.