A common problem in the Internet world is that you can’t access some service, like a website. You wonder if the problem is affecting everyone, only you, or your ISP. Following are some tips to help determine which.
Check a few common and very robust web sites like www.google.com, www.amazon.com, www.microsoft.com in your browser. Can you reach those sometimes, never? If all are not reachable and/or all are very slow, the problem is more likely to be your home or the Xbar7 network. If some load great and others not great, then the problem is more likely to be related to specific sites on the Internet.
Check Downdetector.com to see if there are reports of issues similar to yours. Assuming you can get to this site, you will see what kind of problems are affecting many people on the global Internet at a specific time/date.
Check individual sites at Downforeveryoneorjustme.com. If Downforeveryone reports the site down, then it’s really down for everyone.
Google Internet problems or something like that. Widespread issues like the recent Dec 2021 Amazon outage are typically reported widely on the Internet and by various news sources.
If you can’t get to the above sites and/or they are all very slow, try some more advanced troubleshooting.
Open a terminal (command.com in windows, terminal in mac). Next try ping (max/linux/windows) and traceroute (mac/linux) or tracert (windows) to 8.8.8.8. If all is well it should look something like this:
$ ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=4.20 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=3.92 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=4.35 ms
^C
— 8.8.8.8 ping statistics —
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 5ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 3.923/4.159/4.351/0.177 ms
$ traceroute -n 8.8.8.8
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.168.4.1 0.599 ms 0.552 ms 0.526 ms
2 192.168.5.146 0.682 ms 0.660 ms 0.600 ms
3 192.168.5.92 1.157 ms 1.166 ms 1.148 ms
4 67.148.54.97 4.465 ms 4.525 ms 4.511 ms
5 205.171.210.9 4.163 ms 4.045 ms 4.055 ms
6 72.14.213.218 3.904 ms 3.774 ms 3.706 ms
7 * * *
8 8.8.8.8 4.227 ms 142.251.61.183 3.842 ms 142.251.61.181 3.579 ms
If ping reports no response or packetloss > 1-2% there is a problem.
If traceroute does not report results beyond 192.168.X.Y, then there may be a problem with the Xbar7 network or your home network in which case, you should submit a ticket to Xbar7 for help using the Xbar7 ticketing system.