The screens that mean failure

An error screen has to describe a failure to somebody who may know nothing about how the connection works. That pushes it towards general wording, and general wording collapses several distinct failures into one message.

The result is that the same screen appears whether you mistyped the address, the service is not answering, the path could not be built, or something in between. The message is accurate and nearly information free.

Because a mistyped address produces exactly the same failure as a dead service, the first thing to rule out is your own copy. It is the only cause on the list you can settle on your own with certainty.

The traded symbol tiles are here for that reason. A meaningful share of the characters in these strings belong to a set the eye swaps, so a transcription error is a live possibility whenever an address was not pasted. If you typed it, or if it came from a photograph or a piece of paper, check that before concluding anything about the destination.

If you pasted it from this page, that cause is unlikely and you can move on to the others, though as the panel on what a check cannot reach says, pasting inherits whatever the source was.

• It rules out the page having loaded. That is genuinely the whole list.
• It does not rule out the address being correct.
• It does not rule out the service being fine and the path being the problem.
• It does not rule out the same attempt succeeding shortly afterwards with nothing changed.

The obvious thing a reader wants at this point is somewhere to look up whether an address is currently working. This board does not do that and will not.

The reason is not modesty. A status claim requires a probe, a probe requires making a connection, and a site that made connections would be reporting on its own path rather than on yours. Given that paths differ, and given the symptom ambiguity described above, a status light would be a confident answer to a question it cannot actually settle.

So the board says nothing about reachability anywhere, on any page, and carries no last checked marker. That is a limitation and it is stated rather than papered over.

1. Wait, properly, before deciding anything has failed. Most first failures are impatience.
2. Check your own copy of the address if it did not come from a paste. This is the only cause you can settle yourself.
3. Try a different address from the set. It changes the destination rather than repeating the attempt.
4. Try ordinary browsing. It separates your side of the path from everything else in about ten seconds.
5. Stop. Come back later. Nothing on the list above is improved by doing it repeatedly.

The order matters more than the steps. Almost everybody does step three first, step two never, and step five only after a great deal of unnecessary frustration. Doing the cheap and conclusive checks before the expensive and inconclusive ones is most of what troubleshooting is.

If the screen says the address cannot be found, is it wrong?

It may be, or the service may not be answering, or the path may have failed. The screen does not distinguish those.

Should I try a different address after a failure?

It is the most informative next step, because it changes the destination rather than repeating the attempt.