I find I suddenly can’t access a couple of common websites – amazon.com, fark.com among them. Downforeveryoneorjustme.com said that amazon was indeed down, but fark supposedly up – but now I can’t access it any more. The same problem exists on my girlfriend’s computer. We’re behind the same router, but that worked fine till a moment ago…
Obviously, other parts of the net (the dope, google, etc.) work fine.
So, what’s all this, then? Anybody else experiencing any problems, or has something gone seriously awry on my end?
Hmm, I seem to be able to access both fark and amazon via proxy, but no luck directly. Any idea what that means?
Nevermind, restarting the router seems to have fixed the problem. Whew, got in a bit of a panic for a little while there! 
Still, to just selectively loose access to a few websites seems kinda odd; what could have gone wrong there?
Weirdness on the internets? Perish the thought.
DNS. Your browser caches results.
The thread title is the logical fallacy known as a “False Dichotomy”. The web went weird about 30 minutes after it was invented. I don’t know about you but my own eccentricities predate the web.
Google seems to deliver a lot more commercial links, of the sort where you only get the information if you buy something (e.g. Amazon). It might just be something I broke on my end, with regard to my Firefox settings–and perhaps my hesitation in downloading 5.0. This is really rather disappointing; it reminds me of the early days of web browsing, circa 1997, when most search engines were fairly lousy. You’d type in your search terms and get mostly ads. Does anyone remember AltaVista, or using Yahoo to search? Or the AOL sandbox? In recent years Google had seemed to be so much better that I almost applauded their domination of the search engine market on the grounds that they deserved it because they were so good. Now I’m not so sure.
Yeah, Alta Vista with an ever longer line of “and not this site” and “does not contain” rules to try to get something useful.
Funny about the problems. I have had a very similar experience just now. I was unable to connect to the akamai server hosted by my ISP. Everything else was fine, but that server was not - to me. traceroute would get half way there, but it was fine for the support guys. I was 99% convinced there was a routing misconfiguration. But a restore factory settings/ restore saved setting on my ADSL router cleared it. I have the odd feeling there might have been an IPV6 related issue in the way. I had recently upgraded the firmware version to one that supports v6, but not done anything else, and my ISP has v6 support. It may be that the return path was confused because I had a bad v6 config visible after my upgrade. Odd anyway.