Have you ever visited a website on a browser to be shown a message that the website cannot be loaded? Well, I have been through that several times. It could be due to a DDoS attack or due to a website suffering from heavy user traffic. However, the browser message is not always useful to end users.
That said, if you are a Google Chrome user (dev version for now), there is some cloud intelligence being used to determine why a website is down, whilst providing users with an option to still surf the webpage through a Cached copy available on Google.
Here is a recent page not loaded message displayed to me on the Chrome developer version when I visited Dropbox forums to take part in their treasure hunt.
As you can see from the screenshot above, Google Chrome is now including a message saying that "Other users are also experiencing difficulties connecting to this site, so you may have to wait a few minutes". I found this message to be quite useful since I usually rush to http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ to figure out whether a website is just down for me or everyone else too.
Kudos to the Google Chrome team for creating such informative messages for error pages. It always helps because people usually want to know what is wrong, rather than having to deal with a stupid error page.
*This feature is currently only available in dev builds of Google Chrome, you might not see it in the stable build.
