Your Writing App Stopped Loading Mid-Draft. Here's What to Do Next

You're 1,500 words into a chapter. You switch tabs for a minute, come back, and the editor won't load. Maybe it's a spinning wheel. Maybe it's a 503. Either way, your draft is inside something that isn't answering.

Don't start retyping from memory yet. Work out what's actually broken first, because the fix depends on it.

Key points:
1. First find out if the app is down for everyone or just you. That one answer decides every next step.
2. Don't paste your draft into three other apps. It creates version chaos you'll spend hours untangling.
3. Keep writing in a single scratch file with a clear note, then merge it back once when the app returns.

Step 1: Is It Down for Everyone, or Just You?

This is the question that matters, and you can answer it in seconds. Paste the app's address into the IsItDown.now website checker. It requests the site from its own servers, on a different network and route from yours, and shows exactly where the request failed.

The result points you one of two ways:

• The checker reaches it and you can't. The problem sits between you and the app: your DNS, browser cache, an extension, a VPN or your internet provider.
• The checker can't reach it either. The app is genuinely down. There's nothing to fix on your end, so stop troubleshooting and protect your work instead.

If this happens to you often, the free IsItDown.now browser extension puts a red question mark on its icon when a page fails to load and offers to run the check for you. It can't see the pages you visit and sends nothing unless you click it.

Step 2: If It's Just You, Rule Out Your Connection

When the app is up for everyone else, work through your own setup in order. The guide to whether it's your internet or the website lays out five tests, fastest first. The short version:

1. Open two or three unrelated websites. If they all fail, it's your connection, not the app.
2. Switch your phone to mobile data and try the app there. That swaps out your router, your provider and your DNS in one move.
3. Turn off your VPN or ad blocker for a moment.
4. Try a private browser window, which skips most extensions and cached files.

Most people find the cause by step two.

Step 3: Read the Error, Because It Tells You a Lot

Error messages aren't just noise. They tell you what kind of problem you're facing and roughly how long to wait.

What you see	What it usually means	What to do
503 Service Unavailable	The server is busy or in planned maintenance	Wait a few minutes; it's often deliberate and short
502 Bad Gateway	Something behind the app isn't responding	Wait and retry; the fault is on their side
Page loads but saving fails	A partial outage: one feature is broken	Stop typing in the app until saving works again
Can't connect or timed out	DNS or network trouble	Go back to step 2

A 503 in particular is often a choice rather than a crash. As IsItDown.now's explainer on the 503 Service Unavailable error puts it, a server returning 503 is frequently healthy and simply deciding not to serve you right now, usually because of maintenance or heavy load.

The sneaky one is the third row. A partial outage is when the app loads perfectly but something inside it, like saving or syncing, doesn't work. Monitors often report the site as healthy because the home page still comes back. For a writer, this is the dangerous case, because you keep typing into something that isn't saving.

Step 4: Protect What You've Already Written

Before anything else, secure the text on your screen.

• Don't close the tab. If the editor still shows your draft, that text may still be recoverable.
• Select all and copy the visible draft into a plain text file on your computer. Put today's date in the file name.
• Find out whether the app keeps a local copy. Some editors hold unsaved changes on your device and retry when the connection comes back.

That last point is worth knowing before an outage, not during one. Strut's long-form editor keeps a copy on your device when a save fails, retries until the save lands, and offers to restore the text on your next visit. It also writes version checkpoints as the draft changes. Whatever you write in, learn how it behaves when the network drops, because that's exactly when it counts.

Step 5: Keep Writing, but in One Place Only

Here's the mistake almost everyone makes. The app is down, so you open a notes app and write a bit. Later you switch to an email draft. Then a Google Doc. By the time the app is back, your chapter exists in four places and none of them is complete.

Pick one scratch file. Just one. At the top, write something like:

Written during the outage on 12 March. Picks up after the paragraph ending with the harbour scene. Merge back into Chapter 7.

That note is what makes merging painless. When the app returns, you paste the scratch text in once, at the right spot, and delete the file. Strut's guide to keeping a single source of truth for your manuscript goes further into why forked drafts cause so much trouble later, and how to stop them forming.

Step 6: Decide How Long to Wait

Most outages are short, but not all of them. For the longer ones, the IsItDown.now guide on what to do when a website you need is down is worth a read. A rough rule for writers:

• Under 15 minutes: keep writing in your scratch file and check back.
• An hour or more: look for an update on the app's status page or social accounts, and switch to offline work like editing a printout or outlining the next section.
• Several hours, or a deadline today: copy out whatever you can reach and finish in your scratch file. Merge later.

Before the Next Outage

A few small habits turn the next outage into a non-event:

1. Know where your app's export button is, and export your big projects now and then.
2. Learn whether your editor keeps local copies when a save fails.
3. Bookmark the app's status page next to IsItDown.now.
4. End each session with a one-line note on where to start next time. If the app is down tomorrow morning, you'll still know what to write.

The Short Version

Check whether the app is down for everyone first. If it's just you, fix your connection. If it's everyone, copy your draft out, write in one scratch file with a clear merge note, and wait it out. The worst outcome isn't losing ten minutes. It's losing track of which version of your chapter is the real one.