Did you know...

In December there was a significant multiple day outage on the part of Internet service provider Time Warner/Spectrum that impacted the ability of many of our users to access AWARDS.  Because of how Internet traffic is structured and routed, the outage meant that for some users they could access a wide variety of websites, but could not reach AWARDS.  Naturally many users reached out to us for assistance, but on our end everything looked great - all servers were up and running with no issues, and we could see users logged into their AWARDS databases and working.  We could also access the sites ourselves with no trouble. The solution for impacted users was simply to wait until Time Warner/Spectrum resolved the issue and to reach out to them for information directly.

(Our favorite analogy in situations like this - you may have seen us use it before - is to think of the internet as a series of roads.  There might be an accident on one road that's preventing you from getting there to AWARDS, but it's not closing all of the roads so you can still get to other destinations.  The accident is not something that either you or I can do anything about; we have to wait till the highway patrol comes and cleans things up, in this case the highway patrol being the service providers that control that stretch of internet traffic.)

If you're ever unsure whether difficulty accessing a website (be it AWARDS or any other site you use regularly) is the result of that site being down or the result of Internet traffic issues or outages, a quick and easy way to check is to use an online resource such as http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.  On that site, enter the URL you're trying to reach into the available field, and then click or just me? 

It'll give you a quick snapshot of the site's current health.  If it shows as being down, you can then use that information to reach out to the site's owner for assistance.

Bonus Tip! 

Other troubleshooting steps you can take if you ever have trouble accessing a specific website include:

  trying from a mobile device on another network (if you can access from one but not another, the problem may be with the network/service provider)

  trying from within a different browser

  resetting your modem and router

  resetting your browser settings

  making sure that your computer's date/time settings are correct (if they're not, it may prevent you from accessing secure - https - websites)

  https://demodb.footholdtechnology.com/help/?12162