A “website down” alert does not always mean your server is actually down.
If your site is behind Cloudflare, your monitoring request can fail because:
- Cloudflare blocks the monitoring bot
- A WAF rule returns 403
- Rate limiting returns 429
- Cloudflare itself is experiencing an outage
Meanwhile, your origin server may still be perfectly healthy.
One useful signal is the cf-mitigated response header. If it is present, Cloudflare intervened before the request reached your server.
The more reliable approach is to distinguish between:
- Cloudflare blocking the monitor
- Cloudflare having an outage
- Your origin actually being down
We broke down how to diagnose each case — and three ways to reduce false downtime alerts:
👉 https://webpixie.io/blog/post/cloudflare-false-downtime-alerts
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