How to Check If Your ISP Has an Outage (vs. Just You)

By Paul Snyman · Published August 9, 2026 · 5 min read

Internet's down, and before you spend twenty minutes restarting the router or sitting on hold, there's a two-minute question worth answering first: is this happening to everyone on your street, or just you? The answer changes what you should do next entirely.

Step 1: Confirm It's Upstream, Not Your Router

Ping your router's gateway address (commonly something like 192.168.1.1). If it responds, your router and local WiFi are working - the problem is somewhere beyond your home. If it doesn't respond, stop here: that's a router or WiFi problem, not an ISP outage, and no outage tracker will help. Our full triage guide walks through this and the layers beyond it in order; PingKit's Smart Diagnostics runs the same check automatically.

Step 2: Check a Live Outage Tracker

Once you've confirmed the problem is upstream, search your provider's name plus "outage" - services like DownDetector aggregate real-time user reports and plot them by area. A cluster of reports near your zip code in the last hour is a strong signal it's not just you. Searching "[your ISP] down" on social media often surfaces the same confirmation even faster during a widespread event.

Step 3: Check Your ISP's Own Status Page

Most major providers publish their own outage map or status page, and it's usually the most authoritative source - it can tell you whether a known outage is affecting your specific address, not just your general area, and often gives an estimated restoration time once the cause is identified. Check your provider's app too; several push outage notifications directly.

What Your Modem's Lights Are Telling You

A solid or normally-blinking "online" light generally means your hardware itself is fine but can't reach the provider's network beyond it - which points toward an outage upstream rather than a fault with your equipment. That lines up with the gateway check from step 1: gateway responds, public internet doesn't, lights look normal - all three point the same direction.

If It Turns Out to Be Just You

If the gateway check fails, or the gateway responds but no outage is being reported anywhere for your provider, the problem is more likely local - your router, your modem, or the line specifically to your home. That's the point to try a router/modem restart, and if it persists, to call support with something more useful to say than "it's not working" - a specific report of which step failed narrows their diagnosis considerably faster.