Can't Open a Website? 3 Tools to Check If It's Blocked or Just You

Working with various websites, especially to constantly gather information or transfer files, is already overwhelming, and when those sites are down, it makes the frustration even worse. Some social media or streaming platforms may be slow, and that's easy to handle, but what if the URL you type brings no result? We have 3 tools that may come in handy when you need to check whether the problem is local (related to your device or IP address) or global.

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies let you route your web browsing through real user IP addresses in specific locations. Essentially, you can test a website by "visiting" it from another country or city. If the site loads normally through a proxy in a different region, then it isn't globally down – it's likely being blocked or inaccessible only from your location. This is especially useful for detecting geo-blocking. Many sites silently block foreign IP ranges without notice, so using a residential proxy as a vantage point can reveal if the site works elsewhere.

Residential proxy servers differ from rotating proxies. With a rotating proxy service, your IP address may change with each request – possibly jumping between locations. That makes it harder to test one specific region. Residential proxies, on the other hand, typically allow "sticky" sessions from a chosen location, appearing as a normal user in that area. Unlike data-center proxies (which often get flagged or blocked due to being from cloud hosts), residential IPs belong to real ISPs, so websites are less likely to blacklist them. This means they offer more accurate location testing. In contrast, rotating proxies can switch through multiple IP addresses for each new request, which is great for anonymity but not ideal for consistently checking one site's availability from one place.

Strengths: Lets you check a site from any region's perspective without traveling there. If the site is only blocked in your country, a residential proxy will show it loading normally elsewhere. This method also adds anonymity and can grant access to content across borders (e.g. region-locked videos).

Limitations: Quality residential proxies usually cost money or require some setup. Also, you must choose the proxy location thoughtfully as testing multiple regions can be time-consuming.

Global Uptime Checkers

Sometimes the quickest way to answer "down for everyone or just me" is to use a global uptime checker. These are websites or services that ping or load the target site from an external server (or several) and report if it's reachable. If the checker reports "Site is up," then the problem is likely on your side. If it says "Site is down," the outage is probably widespread. Some status checkers even run tests from multiple data centers worldwide and display the results region-by-region. For example, certain services monitor websites from different locations and maintain an outage history. Others crowdsource information: users around the world report outages, and the service aggregates this data into maps and timelines. In fact, community-driven outage monitors often gather millions of user reports daily to quickly detect widespread issues. These sites can visualize if a problem is concentrated in one region by showing outage heat maps, which is a strong clue that it's not just you.

Strengths: Very easy to use – just enter the URL and get an instant answer. Many uptime checkers run from robust networks, providing an objective external perspective. Crowdsourced tools can alert you to big outages early (one platform's real-time data collection enables it to flag problems rapidly). In short, they're a fast first check to see if a site is responding globally.

Limitations: Basic "is it up?" sites may only test from one server location. If a website is blocking your region but not the checker's location, the tool will report "It's up," which technically means the site works, but it might still be just you facing the block. Crowdsourced outage trackers can sometimes suffer false alarms if a localized issue triggers many reports. Also, these tools only tell you that a site is down or not – they won't fix the issue or detail the cause.

DNS Lookup Tools

DNS (Domain Name System) issues are a frequent culprit when a website won't load. DNS is like the phonebook of the internet, translating website names (e.g. example.com) to server IP addresses. If your DNS isn't resolving a domain properly, the site will appear down for you even if it's actually up. A DNS lookup tool helps diagnose this by checking what IP address (if any) the domain name resolves to from different servers around the world. If a lookup tool shows that other servers can resolve the site's address but your computer cannot, you've likely found the problem (it could be that your ISP's DNS is out of date or the domain's DNS records haven't propagated to your region yet).

Using these tools is straightforward: enter the domain, and you'll see responses from various DNS servers. Look for discrepancies or errors like "NXDOMAIN" (no such domain). Many online DNS checkers also report on each region – if Europe DNS servers return an IP but Asian servers don't, that hints at a region-specific DNS propagation delay or block. DNS problems are a common reason for sites being unreachable, so ruling them out is important. Sometimes the fix could be as simple as switching to a public DNS service (like Google or Cloudflare) or flushing your DNS cache.

Strengths: Directly pinpoints name resolution issues. If the site's domain has expired or the DNS records are misconfigured, a lookup tool will reveal that immediately. It can tell you whether "the website isn't found anywhere" (true global issue) or "the name exists and others see it" (problem on your end). This method is also useful if only certain ISPs or regions can't find the site.

Limitations: A bit more technical – reading DNS records (A, AAAA, CNAME, etc.) might be unfamiliar to non-IT users. These tools don't check the web server itself, only the directory lookup. So a site could resolve to an IP address fine (DNS okay) but still be down at the server – in that case DNS tools would say "everything's fine," so you'd need other methods to diagnose further.