How to Check If a Website Is Down

You know the drill: you can't access Twitter or Facebook, and you refresh and refresh before asking your co-worker if it's down for her, too. Next time that happens, skip the hassle and try a simple solution: visiting one of these sites that checks for you. With just one click, you'll see whether everyone else is having trouble with a certain site or if it's a problem on your end.

• Down Right Now: Combining user reports and official announcements, the site monitors the status of most social networks (plus other services like Yahoo! Mail) with accurate updates. Bonus: it lists when a site's last service disruption was.
• Is It Down Right Now?: Similar to Down Right Now, Is It Down Right Now? differs with graphs that display service status activity, gives you a response time, and monitors a much larger pool of sites (besides social media) that includes Chase.com and T-mobile.com.
• Down For Everyone or Just Me: It doesn't get much simpler than this. Just fill in the blank to the question "Is ___ down for everyone or just me?" and voilà, you have your answer without many ads or graphs on the page to distract you.