If you own and manage one or multiple websites, you must periodically check the server status of your sites. Or you may be an internet user and are facing some issues in connecting to your favorite websites. In this case, also you should go and check the status of these websites or the website that you are not connecting to.

In case you are a website owner, and you come to know that your website is down, you will contact the hosting service provider and find out what's wrong. In case you are an internet user, and a favorite website is not responding it isn’t much you can do. All you can do is keep visiting the site and hope it becomes operational.

Although all hosting service providers try their best to keep their services up 24/7 at times, they also face issues. If the power goes down and they don’t have a backup power provider, like generators, etc., the websites they are hosting will be down. If one of the servers goes down again, the websites will go down. If a switch or router fails, the sites will be down. There are so many technical issues that internet service providers must face.

Now, these are problems that can occur at the hosting service provider's end, but other problems can occur at the user's end as well. If your internet service provider is facing any issues, they cannot connect you to the internet. The problem could be very simple; your internet connection is down.

On the other hand, the internet spans the globe and problems can occur anywhere. Internet service providers install measures to cater for any types of problems that can occur at their end to avoid any breakdown in their service. Search engines are also extremely smart, and if they encounter a problem in trying to access a website on one route, they will try another route. In fact, they have several options available to reach the hosting server of a website. That’s why as a user you might see that the search engine is taking excessive time to load a website.

No one has an answer to how long are websites down for. No one can predict with any accuracy domain outages. There is a range of technical issues that can occur, and even with the best firewalls installed websites can be attacked by malware and hackers. But all website hosting service providers and internet service providers know how heavy the internet traffic is and cannot afford for their systems to be down. Therefore they install adequate measures to protect their systems and provide seamless service to their users.

There are utilities to check website down status or run a website security checker. What these checks can do is to tell you what could be wrong with your website. Once you as the website master know what's wrong with your website, you can take steps to fix it. No website owner wants their website to remain down for an extended period.