What happened to my website?

5 things to try when a site stalls

As Sarah eagerly tapped her smartphone screen, expecting Aunt Janet’s latest photos to open on Facebook, she was met with an unexpected blank screen – her phone mysteriously stopped working. Was it the website that quit loading or what happened? Although devices might not always work properly, there are easy ways to help identify the cause of the issue. 

Things like this can happen, such as when in late February customers of a major cell provider noticed something fishy about their service – or lack thereof. During the outage, they were left without a working telephone connection for a few hours. 

When March started, two popular social media sites encountered technical issues that caused their service to go down. Both Facebook and Instagram users reportedly had problems loading or logging in to their accounts. 

In these cases, the cell provider had tens of thousands of outages reported, while Facebook had nearly half a million outages reported at the peak. Although these issues were out of the user’s control, there are approaches that can sometimes resolve the problem – or at least help you understand where the problem lies, so you know how best to proceed. 

So what should you do when a website isn’t working? When Facebook isn’t showing you Aunt Janet’s new photos, try these steps: 

• Visit another website to find out if there are network connectivity issues affecting all browsing or if the issue is just with the one site you are visiting. 
• Go to DownDetector.com to see whether other people are experiencing the same troubles with a website. Simply type in the service that seems to need fixing to see if other people are experiencing the same problem. 
• Check the distance of your device from your router. The space between you and your router might affect your connection strength. 
• Make sure your devices and apps are up to date. Updates improve the quality of your experience and put less stress on your devices. 
• Review the helpful support information on the Golden West website. Maybe something was accidentally unplugged! 

Golden West works hard to maintain our network and keep you continuously connected. In some cases, a service disruption is not related to our connection and is out of our control. 

In many instances, large networks and sites outside our network go down due to technical problems such as equipment failure. While cyberattacks might come to mind first, the chances of this being the case are low. Only about a tenth of all major outages in a year are due to a malicious attack, while about half of the outages are caused by a power failure. 

Connection issues can happen that aren’t related to your internet service provider. Finding the cause of the trouble when you aren’t sure what happened can be as simple as the click of a button, a quick internet search, or a phone call. 

Feel free to contact the Golden West help desk anytime for assistance by calling 1-855-888-7777, option 1. 

Sources: NBC News, Reuters, Uptime Institute