How to Check If a Service Is Down

Something is not working. Slack messages are not sending. Stripe payments are failing. Your Shopify store is throwing errors. The first question that crosses your mind: is the service actually down, or is this a problem on my end?

Answering that question quickly is critical. The faster you confirm a vendor outage, the sooner you can stop debugging your own code and start executing your outage response plan. Here is a practical guide to the methods available for checking whether a service is down, and when to trust each one.

1. Check the Official Status Page

Most major SaaS providers maintain a public status page. This is your first stop. Status pages are typically hosted at a predictable URL like status.slack.com, status.stripe.com, or status.shopify.com.

Vendor status pages are the most authoritative source, but they are not always the fastest. Many companies take several minutes to update their status page after an incident begins. Some are even slower. Do not assume everything is fine just because the status page says "All Systems Operational."

When to trust it: Status pages are reliable once they acknowledge an incident. If the status page confirms a problem, you can be confident the vendor is aware and working on a fix.

When to be skeptical: If you are experiencing issues but the status page shows green, the vendor may not have detected the problem yet, or the issue may be limited to specific regions or features.

2. Use a Third-Party Monitoring Tool

Third-party monitoring tools aggregate status information across multiple vendors and can sometimes detect issues before the vendor's own status page is updated. Tools like Is That Down track dozens of services simultaneously and provide a single view of vendor health.

Aggregated Dashboard

Faster Detection

Historical Data

Instant Alerts

When to trust it: Third-party tools are especially useful for getting early warnings and for confirming that a problem is on the vendor's side, not yours.

When to be skeptical: If only one monitoring tool reports an issue and no other sources confirm it, the false positive rate means you should investigate further before declaring an outage.

3. Check Social Media and Community Reports

Twitter (X) and Reddit are surprisingly effective at surfacing outages in real time. When a major service goes down, affected users post about it within minutes. Searching for phrases like "Slack down" or "Stripe not working" will quickly reveal whether others are experiencing the same issues.

Downdetector.com aggregates user reports of outages and can give you a quick sense of whether a service is experiencing widespread issues. A spike in reports is a strong signal that something is wrong.

When to trust it: Social media is a great "wisdom of the crowd" check. If hundreds of people are reporting the same issue at the same time, the service is almost certainly having problems.

When to be skeptical: Individual reports may reflect local network issues, account-specific problems, or user error. Look for volume and consistency in reports before drawing conclusions.

4. Run Your Own Checks

If you want to verify independently, there are several technical checks you can run.

Ping the service

Open your terminal and run ping api.stripe.com or the equivalent for the service in question. If you get timeouts, the service may be unreachable. If you get responses, the server is reachable but may still have application-level issues.

Check DNS resolution

Run nslookup slack.com or dig slack.com to verify that the domain resolves correctly. DNS failures can cause what appears to be an outage even if the service itself is running.

Test from a different network

Try accessing the service from your phone's cellular connection or a VPN. If it works from a different network, the problem may be with your ISP or local network, not the vendor.

Try a different region or endpoint

Some services have region-specific endpoints. If the US endpoint is down, try the EU one. This can also help you narrow down whether the issue is global or regional.

When to trust it: These checks are useful for ruling out local issues. If you can reach the service from multiple networks and locations but it is still not functioning correctly, the problem is almost certainly on their end.

5. Check the Vendor's API Status

For developer-focused services like Stripe, Twilio, or GitHub, the API status is often more granular than the main status page. API status endpoints may report degraded performance on specific endpoints even when the overall status page shows green.

Many vendors also provide incident feeds via RSS or Atom that you can subscribe to for automated updates.

Putting It All Together

The most reliable approach combines multiple sources. Here is a practical decision framework.

Do not spend more than 5 minutes trying to determine whether a vendor is down. If you have checked two or three sources and the evidence points to a vendor issue, treat it as an outage and activate your response plan. You can always adjust later if it turns out to be a local problem.

Start with the vendor's official status page. If it confirms an issue, you are done. If it shows all green but you are still having problems, check a third-party monitoring tool and social media. If multiple independent sources report issues, treat it as a confirmed outage.

If you cannot find confirmation anywhere else, run your own technical checks to rule out local network or DNS issues. If everything looks fine on your end but the service is still misbehaving, report the issue to the vendor's support team and monitor for updates.

The key takeaway is that no single source is perfectly reliable on its own. Official status pages can be slow to update. Social media can be noisy. Your own checks may miss application-level problems. Cross-referencing multiple sources gives you the most accurate picture of what is happening.

Stop checking status pages manually

Is That Down monitors 30+ services and alerts you the moment an outage is detected. One dashboard, all your vendors.