How it works
Our server requests the home page of each of the 62 sites we watch. The busiest ones are checked every minute; the rest every five. When you open a page here you are reading stored results, not triggering a check, so it is fast and it cannot be used to poke at other people's servers.
What the statuses mean
Up. The site returned a normal page that looks like the real thing, in under 3 seconds.
Slow. It answered, but took longer than 3 seconds.
Down. A server error, a missing page, a timeout, or no connection. We check again before declaring an outage, so one dropped request will not trigger it.
Can't verify. The site blocked our check or showed a robot test. A block page proves the network in front of the site is alive, not that the site works, so we do not count it as up. These checks are left out of uptime figures.
Where it can mislead
We check from a single location. A site can be down for you and up for us, or the reverse, because of your network, your DNS or a regional outage. Big sites are usually partly broken rather than fully down, and a home page that loads does not mean logging in or posting works.
Use it in your own tools
Everything on this site is available from the API.