Website down, Internal Server Error 500
This afternoon I got a notification from my downtime monitor that all websites running on my Linode were down. I'm trying to figure out what went wrong, because it doesn't make sense to me.
- My downtime monitor said that the website was down, returning an Internal Server Error 500.
- I was able to open all websites without any issues or errors.
- I'm using Cloudflare and I didn't see anything weird there either.
- I tried a few "Is my website down" websites and one said it was down, the other one said it wasn't.
- I checked my Linode dashboard and everything seemed fine (CPU, etc.).
- After 27 minutes my websites were back online, although I didn't touch anything.
Any suggestions what this might have been?
1 Reply
jcardillo
Linode Staff
@eaglejohn - That definitely seems odd. What is the downtime monitor you're using? Could there be anything about how it's configured that might give a false positive since (almost) everything else was pointing to your sites being up? Is this the first you've experienced this issue with this monitor?
If the monitor you're using has a forum, you could maybe reach out to other users to see if they've experienced this.
If you haven't done so already, I'd also recommend checking your Apache or Nginx error logs to see if they reveal anything from around the time your sites were reporting as down:
Apache
/var/log/apache2/error_log
Nginx
/var/log/nginx/error.log
The only other thought that comes to mind is that you could've experienced a DoS, though you mentioned you have your sites behind Cloudflare. The only time a DoS could still affect you behind Cloudflare, though, is if your Linode IP is attacked directly.
If you ever experience this again, you could run a tcpdump on your Linode to see what the traffic looks like. Though, based on the information you provided, I'm pretty sure a DoS is not the culprit.