When the Internet Breaks: Why Your Website is Down
We woke up to a digital nightmare this morning—one of those post-apocalyptic moments where websites vanish, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Level3 internet outage map
The Internet: More Than Just Wires
The internet isn’t just a simple connection from your home to your local internet service provider (ISP). Think of it like a grocery store. Your local market doesn’t magically stock its shelves—products are delivered from warehouses. The same goes for websites. They don’t just appear on your screen; they travel through multiple layers of infrastructure.
And just like a delivery truck can break down and delay your fresh produce, a disruption anywhere in the system can prevent a website from reaching your device.
How a Website Gets to You
Let’s break it down using our grocery store analogy:
Step 1: The Warehouse
A website lives on a physical server housed in a data center—a massive warehouse filled with thousands of servers. These centers are scattered across the country, with major hubs in Dallas, Chicago, and Virginia (where most of the sites we host are located).
Step 2: The Highway
Just like grocery trucks transport goods to your local market, your website travels through high-speed fiber networks from the data center to your ISP. These internet “highways” are managed by major providers, similar to how interstate highways are run by the federal government.
Step 3: The Local Roads
Once your ISP receives the website data, it delivers it to your device—whether that’s a phone, laptop, or gaming console—just like you bring groceries home from the store.
What Happens When Things Break?
Disruptions can occur anywhere along the journey, just like supply chain issues can leave grocery shelves empty. Sometimes it’s due to hardware failure, and thanks to built-in redundancies, you may not even notice. But when a cyberattack occurs, it often requires human intervention to fix—leading to delays.
This Morning’s Internet Outage
Today, a major provider, Level 3, experienced a failure at the "highway" level, affecting much of the East Coast. Early reports suggest a malicious Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack targeted a critical part of the infrastructure, causing websites to get “stuck in traffic” and unable to reach their final destination—your screen.
We have tools to monitor outages and recommend you subscribe to our status page.