Website Working Everywhere Except the Office

A website fault that only appears from one location is harder to diagnose than a website that is simply down. When the site loads from everywhere except the business's own office, the question is no longer whether the website is broken — it is where in the network path the connection is failing, and which supplier owns that part.

The Problem

Staff at a business found that their own website displayed a "site can't be reached" error when accessed from inside the office. The same website loaded without issue from mobile connections and from external locations — it was clearly not a general outage.

Several technology suppliers were involved: a telecoms provider responsible for the office internet connection, a web developer responsible for the website and hosting, and IT support managing the internal network. Without a clear view across all three, no single supplier had enough information to establish where the fault actually sat.

The result was a fault that remained unresolved while each supplier pointed towards someone else's part of the system.

The Investigation

Altitude IT compared the website connection from the affected office network against a separate working internet connection — testing each layer in the same sequence from both locations.

• DNS resolution: website address resolved to the same server IP from both locations — DNS working correctly, not the cause
• External HTTPS connection: website accepted secure connections and returned the expected response — website server healthy
• External redirect: HTTP to HTTPS redirect completed successfully — web server responding normally
• Office-side HTTPS connection: connection timed out before reaching the HTTPS stage — traffic stopped before reaching the server
• Office-side direct IP test: testing the server IP address directly produced the same timeout — confirmed the block was network-level, not DNS or hostname

These results ruled out a general website failure, a browser or device problem, and a DNS fault. The website was reachable and healthy. The failure was specific to the network path from the office connection to the web server.

The Diagnosis

The test results showed that the fault existed in the network path between the office's internet connection and the web server — not within the office network itself and not within the website or its hosting.

Altitude IT documented both the working and failing test results and provided the office's public IP address so the relevant supplier could search its firewall logs.

When a connection times out before reaching HTTPS, the problem is not the website — it is something between the office and the server.

The Resolution

The fault was traced to a telecoms firewall blocking the connection between the office's internet circuit and the web server's IP address. With the documented test results and the office public IP in hand, the telecoms provider was able to locate the relevant firewall entry and correct it.

Once the firewall issue was resolved, staff could access the website normally from the office.

• Office-side website access restored after firewall correction
• Fault cause identified and attributed to the correct supplier
• Web developer and internal network ruled out as causes
• Supplier given specific, actionable evidence rather than a vague complaint

The Value of Independent Diagnosis

The main problem here was not a lack of suppliers. Each involved party had genuine expertise in their own area. The issue was that no single supplier had a view across all three. Altitude IT cut through the uncertainty by testing each layer separately — comparing what worked with what failed — and turning a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible connectivity fault with a clear owner.

When several suppliers are involved, responsibility can become unclear. Independent testing replaces blame with evidence and gets the fault to the right team.