Your website’s home page has stopped answering properly, so visitors, customers and search engines can’t reach it. Every minute it stays down can cost sales, leads and trust.
What it means
Our servers tried to load the home page and got no answer, a server error (5xx) or “page not found” (404 or 410). Answers such as “unauthorised” (401), “forbidden” (403) or “too many requests” (429) count as up, because the server is there.
What triggers it
Uptime monitoring loads the home page every 15 minutes. Only a second failure in a row counts as an outage, and before declaring one, servers in other regions try too: if most of them can load it, no outage is declared. An outage raises a Critical issue showing when it started and the error, and owners and admins get a downtime email straight away.
Common causes
- The hosting server is down, overloaded or the account has been suspended.
- A deploy, plugin or theme update that makes the website throw server errors.
- An expired domain or SSL certificate, or a DNS change that points the domain somewhere else.
- A firewall, CDN or security plugin blocking our servers while the website works for everyone else.
How to fix it
- Open the website in a browser to see what visitors get, and compare it with the error shown in the issue.
- Check your host’s status page or control panel, and contact their support if the server is down or the account suspended.
- If anything changed recently, such as a deploy, plugin update or DNS change, undo it.
- If the website loads fine for you but stays down here, allowlist our servers; see Allowlisting our IP address.
When it clears
It clears at the first check the home page answers properly, and chat channels that heard about the outage are told it’s back. For the next 7 days the outage shows as Website was down in the last 7 days instead.