Almost every "is my broadband down" moment is one of two things. Either your provider has fallen over, or something between your router and your screen has. The board above settles the first half. If your provider is red or amber, sit on your hands. It is a network fault, there is nothing for you to fix, and phoning to report it only puts you in a queue behind ten thousand people who have just read the same colour you have.

If it is green, the trail leads back to your own four walls, and confirming that takes about thirty seconds. Turn the wifi off on your phone and load a page on mobile data. Then try a second device on the wifi. If your phone works on mobile data but nothing works on wifi, the suspect is your line or your router, not the wider network. If mobile data is rotten too, that is a phone-signal problem wearing a broadband disguise.

If the board says your provider is fine and the fault is at your end, work through these in order. Most "down" moments never survive step two.

• Check a second device. If the laptop is dead but your phone is perfectly happy on the same wifi, the problem is that one device, not your broadband.
• Restart the router properly. Unplug it at the wall, count to thirty, plug it back in, then give it two to five minutes to find its feet. Do not hold the reset pin. That wipes every setting it has and turns a five-minute job into a lost afternoon.
• Check the cables. The broadband cable should run firmly into your master socket, the one nearest where the line enters the house, with nothing hanging loose.
• Go wired. Plug a laptop straight into the router with an ethernet cable. If that works and the wifi does not, the line is fine and your wifi is the culprit, which our wi-fi speed test guide sorts out.
• Run a speed test. A result that flat-out fails, or limps in at a fraction of what you pay for, is the evidence to wave at your provider if you end up reporting a fault. Start with our broadband speed test.

Sometimes the provider is fine across the country but your street is not: a cut cable, a sick cabinet, a power cut at the local exchange. The quickest tell costs nothing and lives next door. If the neighbours on the same provider are also sitting in the dark, it is a local network fault, and fixing it is the provider's job, not yours.

This is where it pays to narrow things to your own provider rather than asking "is my broadband down" into the void. Every provider we track has its own page here, each with its live status and a link through to the provider's own official status page. Start with yours, whether that is BT, Sky or Virgin Media O2. And if the board says your provider is fine but you are still dark, our broadband troubleshooter narrows it down to whether the problem is your line, your router or your wifi.

The two look identical from the sofa and are fixed in completely different ways, so it is worth telling them apart.

An outage is a network problem. It takes out a lot of people at once, your provider already knows, and there is nothing to do but wait. You do not need to call. It will come back on its own.

A fault on your own line affects only you, and it behaves differently. The connection drops and recovers, over and over. Speeds crawl instead of cutting out clean. Or it has been sliding for days rather than dying all at once. That one needs a repair, which means reporting it and, often, an engineer on the doorstep in the last forty-five minutes of a four-hour window. To narrow it down before you pick up the phone, the same troubleshooter walks you through it in a couple of minutes.

One thing worth knowing before you write a long outage off as bad luck: most large UK providers are signed up to Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme. If a total loss of service drags past two full working days, they owe you £10.34 for every further day you are offline, plus £32.31 for any engineer appointment they miss, and it is meant to land on your bill automatically without you chasing it. Worth checking yours is on the list, and worth checking the money actually turned up, because "automatic" and "happened" are not always the same word. Our guide on when you're owed automatic compensation has the detail.