Why do I see "This site can't be reached" only on my device, not everyone else's?

You call a friend, send them the link, and they say the site opens just fine. On your screen, the same address shows "This site can't be reached" or "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED". It's frustrating, and honestly a little scary: you assume your whole site is down.

Good news: if others can see it, your site is almost certainly fine. The problem lives somewhere on the road between your device and the server, not in the server itself. In this article I'll show you, step by step, how to pinpoint exactly where the connection breaks and what you can do right now, without calling anyone. These are things you can check yourself in a few minutes, even if you're not technical.

First test: is it really only you?

Before anything else, confirm the assumption. Don't rely on a single friend — they might have the same problem by coincidence.

• Open the site on your phone, but on mobile data, not your home Wi-Fi. If it works on data but not on Wi-Fi, the issue is in your home network or your ISP.
• Ask two or three people in different cities to try.
• Use a free "is it down" service (search Google for "downforeveryoneorjustme" and enter your address). It tells you whether the server responds from the outside.

If the site responds for other people and for the checker service, you've confirmed it: the server is alive. From here on, we hunt for the problem on your side, not the site's.

Cause number one: a stale DNS cache

DNS is the internet's "phone book": it turns your-address.com into a numeric IP. Your computer and browser remember the answer for a while, to be faster. The trouble starts when the site has moved to a new server (new IP) and you still have the old address saved in cache. Everyone else, who had nothing saved, grabs the new address directly.

How to clear the cache:

• In the browser: try incognito mode, or press Ctrl+Shift+R (Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) to reload without cache.
• Flush the system DNS. On Windows: open Command Prompt and type ipconfig /flushdns. On Mac: in Terminal, sudo dscacheflush.
• Restart your router — it keeps a DNS cache too, sometimes for days.

Most of the time, this is where it gets solved.

When your ISP or your DNS is to blame

If you've flushed the cache and it still won't load, the next suspect is the DNS server you're using — usually the one your internet provider assigns automatically. Sometimes it's slow, misconfigured, or hasn't yet learned that your site moved.

Quick test: temporarily switch your DNS to a public one, such as 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google). You do this in your network settings, under "DNS server". If the site appears after the switch, your provider's DNS was the problem.

There's also the case where the provider actually blocks an address (rare, but it happens). If the site works over a VPN or on mobile data from a different carrier, but not on your fixed connection, that's a clear sign the block is at the ISP — not on you, and not on the site.

Local suspects: the hosts file, antivirus, extensions

Sometimes even the ISP isn't at fault, but something on your own computer is.

• The hosts file: a hidden file that can force an address to the wrong IP. If someone edited it (or a dev tool left it dirty), only you see the error. On Windows it's at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, on Mac at /etc/hosts.
• Antivirus / firewall: some security suites block sites they wrongly consider dangerous. Temporarily disable web protection and test.
• Browser extensions: an overly aggressive ad-blocker or VPN extension can break loading. Test in incognito, where extensions are usually off.
• Active VPN or proxy: if you have one running, turn it off and retry.

If the site appears in incognito, with no VPN and antivirus paused, you've found the culprit.

How to tell it's actually a real outage

Not everything that errors is your fault. Here are the signs the problem is truly on the site or its hosting:

• The external checker service also reports the site as "down".
• Nobody, on any network, can open it.
• You see different messages, not "this page can't be reached": errors like 500, "Database connection error", or a blank page. Those come from the server, not your connection.
• The SSL certificate has expired ("connection not secure") — that affects everyone.

In these cases, contact the company that hosts your site. If you work with us at MPO Web Studio, message us on WhatsApp and we'll check the server and DNS for you — we deliver maintenance remotely, so it doesn't matter where you are in the country. A well-built site should have monitoring, so you learn about an outage before your customers do.