Half of the internet wouldn't load?

It's fixed now but not sure what broke.

I could get to google but not yahoo or forums.majorgeeks but not majorgeeks.
Half of my favorites were error page can't load, other half loaded fine but seemed slower.

Worked yesterday, did not do anything but update avast, so not something I changed. Effected both laptop and desktop.

I went through the normal look at errors ect...only thing was a memory dump on laptop, checked desktop network...you have a problem contact your admin. *admin looked really dumb and shook her head*

Modem was fine, connection was fine, repaired anyway, ran CCleaner...same, rebooted - no help, checked firewall, nothing. Reset modem, it took connection completely down. Logged into modem and reset manually...connection came up and all is well now.

Checked internet health, seemed to be ok. Checked ATT ISP same old issues but not a ton of new complaints.

But how does half the internet load and the other half not? Trying to figure out what when wrong. Is there a log somewhere that will give me a clue?

Thank you for reading and any input.

Peg

 

I suspect 2 things: hosts file & DNS.

Either of them direct a web address to a specific IP address. i.e. www.yahoo.com to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. hosts file should be read only. DNS is updated once in a while. You can google hosts file for the location of it in your OS. Compare yours against the default one on the Web. As for DNS, it's stored in the modem/router. There are 2 sets of DNS. You can update DNS by disconnecting & reconnecting the modem. If the DNSs are hard coded in Windows, Windows may have problems when the DNS is updated at the ISP level.

Easiest fix - shut down everything, turn them on starting with modem, router and computers.