Lookups
Is It Down?
Wondering if a site is down for everyone or just you? Percival tries to reach it directly from your browser.
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Only tests if your device can reach the site, not if it's down for everyone. Error pages still count as reachable. Some sites block this check entirely.
This check is sent directly from your browser to the site you enter, not to Percival's Toolkit.
Learn about "is it down" checks
How this check actually works
Your browser sends a request straight to the address you enter and times how long it takes to get any response back, timing out after 8 seconds if nothing comes. Because that request is deliberately sent in a browser security mode that hides the response's real status code and content, this check can confirm a server answered, but it can't tell you whether the page it returned was a normal page, an error page, or a maintenance notice. That's a limitation of what any browser-based checker is allowed to see, not something specific to this tool.
Reading your results
A quick "reachable" result means a connection opened and something answered within the timeout. That's a good sign, but it isn't proof the site is functioning normally end to end. A timeout or connection failure after 8 seconds is a stronger signal something's actually wrong, whether that's the server being down, badly overloaded, or blocking automated requests.
Common questions
The site loads fine for me elsewhere. Why did this say it's down? A few common causes: the site blocks requests that look automated, your DNS resolver is caching a different (stale or fresher) answer than this check just got, or the outage is genuinely intermittent and you happened to load a cached copy of the page a moment before or after.
Why can't this tell me if a site is returning an error page? Browsers intentionally prevent JavaScript from reading the real status code of a cross-origin request unless the target site explicitly opts in. That's a security boundary meant to stop malicious pages from probing other sites, and no purely browser-based checker can get around it. Only a server-side monitoring service can.
Is this the same as a crowdsourced outage tracker? No, this is a live check from your own connection, right now. It answers "can I reach this from here," not "are lots of other people also having trouble," which is what services built on user reports are designed to show.