Check Your Favorite Website’s Status Page If You Can’t Connect
A typical part of the morning routine is right after “Really?” I throw my side eye at the alarm clock of my smartphone – checking what is new and good in several subreddits that are important to me. Imagine my surprise this morning when Reddit started giving various error messages every time I tried to open the site.
While in these cases you might be tempted to use F5 (or the little refresh icon in your favorite browser’s toolbar), there is a better way to find out what’s going on with a website when it doesn’t do what you want it to.
In this case, my favorite website to check website status is not working for everyone or just me? – did not help. He said Reddit was online, which is certainly plausible considering I was getting a custom error message and not a 404 or 503 error in my browser.
However, the second trick I tried in these situations worked great. I went to the address bar of my browser, crossed out “www” and typed in “status”, getting the final URL status.reddit.com . This obviously doesn’t work for every website, but I’m fortunate that Reddit – via Statuspage – maintains the most recent series of charts and numbers on site uptime.
Not only could I quickly see that Reddit was having issues flagged as an incident at the top of the page, but I could also drill down to see which sites were affected (reddit.com and / or redditgifts.com) and which other users might test. At launch, the number of requests on reddit.com had dropped to zero and the number of errors had skyrocketed to the top of the site’s chart.
Whatever problem caused Reddit for 20 minutes or so, as later reported in the Past Incidents section of the Reddit status page, affected many, not just me. Trying to break into a website probably wouldn’t be an efficient use of my time, so I didn’t. If I didn’t care, I could even sign up for an email update on the Reddit status page, but then I would get a message every time Reddit encountered a problem (or fix it), which is a bit too much for me.
You can check other popular websites and services with similar status pages:
- Dropbox
- Vimeo
- Cloudflare (Note: unfortunately not status.cloudflare.com)
- Slack
- Github (also not status.github.com)
- Discord
- Cup
- Epic Games (and if you prefer the unofficial Steam status page …)
- Trello
As you will see, some websites prefer the “sitenamestatus.com” implementation over status.website.com. If you have a Web site problem, try both versions – if you’re lucky, you’ll get kakuyu- the status page, so you can understand what is happening.