Guides / Why a site works for everyone else but not me
Updated 3 Oct 2026
Why a site works for everyone else but not me
DNS, cache, ISP paths, school/work filters, and regional blocks — the cases where the vendor is up and you still cannot load it.
The checker says the host is up. Three colleagues have it open. You have a blank page, a timeout, or a certificate warning. That is not an outage. It is a path problem, and path problems are local until proven otherwise.
Work it in this order
- Another browser, private window. Extensions, stale service workers, and a corporate SSL-inspection cert that only one profile trusts cause a surprising number of "the site is down" tickets.
- Another network. Phone LTE, not the office Wi-Fi. If LTE works, your ISP or the office firewall is the incident. If LTE fails too, keep going.
- DNS.
nslookupthe name on your PC and on the phone. Different answers mean a split-horizon resolver, a stale cache, or a filter. Flushing the OS cache is cheap. Changing the world DNS is not — do not do that to "fix" one user. - Regional or school/work block. Some publishers and SaaS admin consoles return different results by country or by the IP range of a known education/office filter. The vendor is up. You are on the wrong side of a policy.
- IPv6 broken, IPv4 fine (or the reverse). Happy Eyeballs hides this until it does not. Disable one family as a test, do not leave it that way.
What this site will not do
A 403 or 429 from our checker is not "the site is down". It means the host answered and then blocked a datacentre. We label that protected. Confirm in a normal browser.
When a VPN is the right tool
If the host is up, your country or your ISP is the thing in the way, and you have permission to use another path, a business VPN is the usual workaround — plus a ticket to whoever owns the filter. It will not fix a vendor outage, and it will not fix a dead office circuit. For the circuit, you want a 4G failover, not a VPN.