Diagnosing "Is it Just Me?"
When your favorite service fails to load, the immediate panic sets in. However, the path from your device to a game server or social media platform is complex. An outage can occur at several distinct points.
To understand where the breakdown happens, visualize the request flow:
[Image of network request flow diagram]
- Local Device: Your Wi-Fi card or software firewall blocking the connection.
- ISP (Internet Service Provider): DNS resolution failures (your ISP can't find the IP address of Netflix).
- Backbone Network: Physical cable cuts or routing errors between your city and the data center.
- Origin Server: The actual computer running the service (e.g., Discord) is crashed or overloaded.