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Alex Payne, a 24-year-old Internet engineer, has devised a way to answer a commonly asked question of the digital age: Is my favorite Web site working today?
In March, on a whim, Payne created downforeveryoneorjustme.com, as in "Down for everyone, or just me?" It lets visitors type in a Web address and see whether a site is generally inaccessible, or whether the problem is on their end.
"I had seen that question posed so often," said Payne, who perhaps not coincidentally works at Twitter, a Web messaging service that is itself known for frequent downtime. "Technology companies have branded the Internet as a place that is always on and where information is always available. People are disappointed and looking for answers when it turns out not to be true."
There is plenty of disappointment to go around these days. Such technology stalwarts as Yahoo, Skype and Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, have all suffered embarrassing technical snafus in the past few months.
Three weeks ago, a surge of visitors to Payne's site began asking about the normally impervious Amazon.com. That site was ultimately down for several hours over two business days, and Amazon, by some estimates, lost more than $1 million an hour in sales.
The Web, like any technology or communications medium, has always been susceptible to unforeseen hiccups. Particularly in the early days of the Web, sites like eBay and Schwab.com regularly went dark. But since fewer people used the Internet back then, the stakes were much lower. But the Web is now an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it.
The companies are promoting the idea of conducting their business and relationships in the "cloud" -- a set of interlinked, geographically dispersed and theoretically disaster-proof servers housed in...

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