Hi friends 👋🏻

If you're entire website suddenly goes offline and visitors see an error message, you would want to know, right?

This happened to a big chunk of the internet last week, and I have some advice to share!

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

How do you find out when your website goes down?

When your website goes offline, how would you rather find out?

1. When someone texts you or posts on social media to complain that they can't load the site?
2. When you get a notification on your phone as soon as the site is unavailable?

#2, right? I have an app on my phone called Uptime Robot that monitors my website (and my clients' websites) and lets me know as soon as any of them experience an issue. Pingdom is another option.

Some website hosting companies offer "uptime monitoring" as well, but I prefer not to rely on that just in case the issue is related to the hosting company themselves! Better to use a third-party service.

What happened on Thursday?

Last week, I got a whole bunch of notifications that the Blue Hills Digital website was down, and many of my clients' websites too.

What did I do?

• I confirmed that they were truly down (occasionally the uptime monitoring sends false alarms)
• I checked the hosting company's status page for an incident report

Both WordPress hosting companies I use had incidents posted within a few minutes confirming that there was a widespread outage.

If the web hosting companies had not already acknowledged the outage, I would have reached out to their support immediately to figure out what's going on.

This let me know it wasn't an issue I couldn't do anything about, so I emailed the impacted clients to let them know. Folks had already started diagnosing the issue on social media – it seemed that some services at Cloudflare were down, caused in turn by issues with the Google Cloud Platform. Since many hosting platforms rely on Cloudflare, this caused a widespread outage.

Google has since apologized (CNBC) and this Mashable story covers the wide range of services that were impacted.

After a couple of hours – feels like a LOOOONG TIME – services started to come back online.

What should you do if your website goes offline?

First – I'm assuming this is an outage that you can't directly do anything about: an outage caused by a vendor that is impacting other sites. (If the outage is just impacting your website, that's an issue you need your developer to fix, ASAP!!)

In a situation like the one that happened last week, you can't access your website to share a message on your website itself. This means you're communication channels are email and social media.

Depending on the amount of traffic your website receives and whether this happens during a particularly high-traffic period of time, you might consider sharing a message on social media explaining letting your audience know that you're aware the website is offline and that you'll be online again "as soon as possible." It often makes sense to avoid being too specific, since the timeframe is largely beyond your control. You can also consider sending an email to your list with similar language.

In both cases, acknowledge the inconvenience, and encourage audience members to contact you by email or social media as an alternative to your website, and post updates as service is restored.

I hope this doesn't ever happen to you, but it's worth making a plan in case it does!!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

Connect on LinkedIn

​