It just won’t. Last night it did, but today, bupkis. Says it can’t find it. Why might that be?
Wikipedia server down? Assuming this is the only website you can’t visit, perhaps they are down.
Maybe you somehow unknowingly blocked access to that url?
Could be a DNS issue; I can get there with no problems. Over at MPSIMS, there’s a thread about issues reaching MapQuest; that appears to be a DNS issue, at least for me.
Hmmm…what is DNS? And yes, I can get to some sites (obviously 
but not others. It just says Internet explorer can’t find it, even though I’m using Firefox.
I have a similar problem. Maybe my experience may help…
About a couple of months ago, a community blog I frequent wouldn’t load. Not in my default browser FF2 and neither in IE6. I hadn’t changed anything so I did a AV sweep…etc. Nothing. So, I toggled on the Firebug add-on in FF to see what was up. Turned out that the HTML would load just fine but that there would be no response from the subdomain serving the stylesheets. I pinged that subdomain successfully. No other site gave me a problem. Forwarding services like Coral didn’t work either probably since they only relay the direct response from the URL. The situation remained the same for a week. Then, just as suddenly, things were back to normal. But now, Wikipedia wouldn’t load. And neither would most of the other Wikimedia sites. This time, Firebug would show a non-response on the main HTML request. A few days later, things again reverted to the earlier state i.e. no blog but Wikipedia loads OK. And it’s been in that state ever since. The one difference is that, now if I try to access the blog, it will render by the 5-6th reload. Also, the login server for this community blog is on its own subdomain and that always loaded fine.
I don’t know what’s going on. Any ideas?
Hell, I’m just happy that it means that it’s not a computer glitch but something external. So I should just wait it out?
I came to GQ this morning to see if anyone else was having problems with the internet.
I can’t get to wikipedia either. I also can’t get to MSN.com, ratebeer.com, IMDB.com, mapquest.com and a few other sites. Looks like waiting it out is the only option.
We should call Al Gore. He invented the damn thing, he can fix it!
I like this little utility for situations like this:
StumbleUpon directed me to it a week or two ago and I’ve had some fun playing with it – unsurprisingly, it tells you if a website is down for everyone, or just you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to provide any insight into why it is down at the moment 
Oh well, I find it useful when it’s up at least.
IANAITP (IT professional) but DNS = Domain Name Server, basically you type in www.whatever.com, you connect to a DNS, and it tells you that site’s IP address: 123.45.191.9 or something. Your computer then connects to that address. If you can not access the DNS, you can’t get to the web site with a URL.
What CoG8888 said is essentially correct. We put in the part that makes sense to us, the URL (www.whatever.com) and the DNS server then translates that into what the machinery needs, the IP address (11.22.33.44) It’s essentially a big table in a database and gets updated every so often by talking to its neighbors. All part of internet magic.
A few years ago I couldn’t get to the MUD I was playing on every day or two with its URL. Everything else I tried came up fine, but not that one URL. I emailed the Qwest help desk and they said “It works here.” Well bully for you; it’s not working here. I connected to the site at work, wrote down the IP address and then could get to the site from home by pasting it into the client I was using. After about two weeks the URL started working again.
I left Qwest shortly after that and never had it come up with Everyones Internet when I was with them about five years, nor the year (so far) I’ve been with Cox.
Is Wiki still not working for you guys? It’s working for me. Mapquest too.
I had a problem a few months ago were I kept getting pages that said " can’t be found" for sites I knew weren’t down - it’d flip to this “can’t be found” page after it’d been displaying it properly for a minute half the time! Eventually I connected the issue to a search toolbar Emusic had me install when I started my subscription and installed their download software. Once I uninstalled it (just the toolbar), the problem went away. You haven’t installed the Alot toolbar, have you?
Not to alarm anybody, but the only time I’ve seen this behavior was when a DNS hijacker trojan was effing up my PC. It redirected my DNS service to it’s server, and would work normally sometimes, but other times would give me several spam pages before it would load the right page. It also completely hijacked Google searches.
I could see the hijacked DNS in my TCP/IP properties, but every time I would change them, they would come back. Something in the registry, I think. Apparently it was a type of malware called Smitfraud. I finally found ‘Hijack This!’, and eventually fixed the problem.
It’s worth looking into.
Any of you using Vista? This seems to be a Vista “feature” for me – every other system on my network (and even the same system booted into XP) can see sites that Vista will occasionally just decide don’t exist. It usually fixes itself after a few hours.
I’ve found that the DNS servers provided by many ISPs are crappy. Since I’ve switched over to OpenDNS I’ve had fewer problems. It’s simple to set up and free. (I am not affiliated with this organization in any way - sorry if this sounds like a commercial)