All of a sudden I go to my WordPress website and all the pages give me a 404 page not found page. I'm assuming the problem lies with the permalink structure, which I could swear I did not touch. The permalink setting is on "month and name."

I've researched similar instances of this problem online and a lot of it has to do with the .htaccess file? I tried finding, but I can't. Perhaps it got deleted somehow? Where is it supposed to be located.

Any suggestions will be helpful

and of course I can see hidden files.