Is it your Wi-Fi or your ISP? How to tell in 30 seconds

A video call freezes. A game spikes. Safari spins. The first question is always the same: is this my Wi-Fi, or is the internet actually down? Guessing wastes time. Rebooting the wrong box wastes more.

You can answer it with two pings at once: one to your router (the gateway), and one to a host on the public internet. If the gateway fails, the problem is local. If the gateway is healthy and the public host fails, the problem is upstream — your ISP, DNS, or the remote service.

What “gateway” means on a home network

Your Mac’s default gateway is almost always the LAN address of your router or mesh node — typically 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1, or something similar. Packets to the internet go through that box first. PingStatus can detect that gateway automatically and keep pinging it beside your chosen internet target.

Read the two lights

• Gateway red, internet red: Wi-Fi dropped, the router rebooted, or the cable between you and the access point failed. Stay local. Check signal, Ethernet, and the router itself.
• Gateway green, internet red or yellow: your LAN is fine. The failure is your ISP, a DNS outage, or the remote host. That is the moment to file a ticket — not to reset your mesh.
• Both green but the app you care about is broken: the path to that specific service is the problem. Point a second target at it and compare.

This split is why PingStatus monitors the gateway separately from the ultimate target. A single ping to 8.8.8.8 cannot tell you which hop died. Two pings can.

When the answer changes after you wake the Mac

Laptops hop networks constantly: home Wi-Fi, a travel router, a corporate VPN. The gateway address changes when you do. PingStatus refreshes the detected gateway after network changes and sleep, so the local vs ISP read stays honest instead of pointing at yesterday’s router.