What to Do When Your Website Goes Down
Downtime can be stressful, but you can handle it calmly with a simple checklist. This guide walks you through confirming the outage, identifying likely causes, avoiding common mistakes, and setting up alerts so you catch issues early next time.
Quick checklist
- 1 Confirm it’s actually down
- 2 Check DNS and SSL status
- 3 Review hosting or provider status pages
- 4 Roll back recent changes
- 5 Communicate clearly and early
How to confirm the outage
Check from multiple networks
Test your site from a mobile connection, another device, or a different location. If it loads elsewhere, you may be dealing with a local network issue instead of a site outage.
Verify DNS resolution
Use tools like nslookup or dig to confirm your domain resolves to the expected IP address. A DNS issue can make a healthy server look offline.
Check TLS/SSL
An expired or misconfigured SSL certificate can cause browsers to fail the connection even if the server is running.
Look at provider status
Hosting providers, DNS vendors, and CDNs often post incidents on their status pages. If they’re down, you can stop digging on your own configuration.
Tip: If the issue started right after a deploy, DNS change, or CDN update, roll back to the last known working state while you investigate.
Common causes of downtime
DNS problems
Missing or incorrect DNS records can prevent your domain from resolving to the right server.
Server or app crashes
Application errors, resource exhaustion, or bad deployments can take the web server offline.
Traffic spikes or DDoS
Sudden traffic bursts can overwhelm infrastructure and make the site unavailable.
SSL/TLS issues
Expired or mismatched certificates often look like downtime to users.
Third-party outages
If your site relies on an external API, payment provider, or CDN, outages there can bring your site down too.
Configuration changes
Firewall rules, redirects, or server configuration updates can unintentionally block requests.
What not to do
- Don’t guess. Confirm the problem before making changes.
- Don’t change multiple systems at once. Make one change, then test.
- Don’t ignore SSL or DNS errors — these are common root causes.
- Don’t go silent. Customers prefer fast updates even if the fix takes time.
How to get alerts next time
Set automated uptime checks
Use a monitoring service to check your site on a fixed schedule. That way you’ll get notified before customers report the issue.
Use multi-check confirmation
Require multiple failed checks before alerting to reduce noise from brief network hiccups.
Track response time
Slow responses are often an early warning sign of an outage. Tracking latency helps you fix issues sooner.
Uptime Basics checks your site from independent AWS infrastructure and alerts you fast so you can respond before users notice.
Communicating during an incident
Update early
Let customers know you’re aware of the issue and investigating. Clear, early updates build trust.
Update often
Share progress at a predictable cadence so customers aren’t left guessing.
After the site is back
Capture what happened
Write down the root cause, the fix, and the total downtime. This helps prevent repeat incidents.
Close the loop
Let customers know the issue is resolved and what you’re doing to prevent it in the future.
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