Website Downtime Checklist: What to Check First

Outages feel chaotic because every layer of the stack can be the culprit. This checklist orders the checks from the fastest to rule out to the deepest — so you stop guessing and start fixing within minutes instead of hours.

1. Confirm it is actually down

Before you wake the team, verify from more than one network. A monitor that checks from multiple regions — like PatchPings uptime monitoring — separates a real outage from a local ISP or VPN glitch. If only you cannot reach the site, flush DNS or try a mobile connection off Wi-Fi.

2. DNS and domain

• Check whether the domain resolves — expired registration is an instant full outage.
• Verify nameservers match what you expect; a stale NS change can point traffic nowhere.
• Look for recent DNS record edits that pointed the apex or www at the wrong target.

3. SSL and certificates

An expired or mis-issued certificate shows as a hard browser block even when the server is running. Check expiry dates, whether the served hostname matches the certificate, and whether auto-renewal failed silently. Our SSL expiry guide covers the two-layer defence that prevents this class of outage.

4. Hosting and CDN

• Check your hosting provider status page — regional failures happen before your app does anything wrong.
• Purge or bypass the CDN temporarily to see if the origin responds directly.
• Review recent deploys; a bad release is the most common application-layer cause.

5. Application and database

If infrastructure is healthy, SSH or open your platform logs. Look for 502/503 from the reverse proxy, database connection errors, and disk-full conditions. Roll back the last deploy if errors started at a known timestamp.

After recovery

1. 1Send a recovery notification so stakeholders know the site is back.
2. 2Add or tune monitoring so the next failure pages you before customers notice.
3. 3Schedule a short retrospective — recurring outages at the same hour often trace to cron jobs or traffic spikes.

The teams that recover fastest are not luckier — they have a checklist, external monitors, and alerts they trust. Download PatchPings for multi-region uptime checks and SSL watch, so the next outage finds you first.