Why is my monitor status wrong?

See what you can do if you get a false-positive or false-negative monitor status.

Home / Help Center / Why my monitor status is wrong?

Sometimes, UptimeRobot may report a false-positive incident. In most cases, it is due to some third-party circumstances. Here's a list of the most frequent issues and their solutions:

1. UptimeRobot request is blocked by your hosting provider

If you can reach the website but UptimeRobot reports an incident, it is probably because of your hosting provider settings.

In this case, you need to ask you hosting provider to whitelist the IPs we are using for checks. It will be helpfull to describe what our service is doing and why you need it.

2. UptimeRobot request is blocked by your server firewall

It is a case similar to the previous one. Just make sure you have whitelisted our IPs in your server firewall settings.

3. UptimeRobot request is blocked by your website security software

It is a case similar to the previous one. Check your website security software (like Wordfence for Wordpress, or similar plugins) settings.

Make sure to whitelist all requests made by our IPs in software settings.

4. UptimeRobot is getting a cached version of your website

Have you fixed the downtime but UptimeRobot still sees your website as down?

The issue may be a cache used by your server. To force UptimeRobot to fetch the latest version of your website, use our Cachebuster feature.

5. Your server is not serving the right response for HEAD requests

By default, we are using HEAD HTTP method for HTTP requests pointing to your website. This is because we don't need the content of a website, just its response headers. Some server configurations may return an error for such a request.

You have two options here: First - configure your server to behave similarly to the GET request. The second option is to setup GET HTTP method in the monitor settings. Keep in mind that this setting is available only for PRO plan users.

6. Heartbeat monitor is not receiving requests (on time)

This is anissue specific for Heartbeat (cron job) monitors. In this case, there might be an issue on your side and we haven't received your request.

Try to make sure you're sending the request to our servers.

Even if you are sending the request, it might not be sent on time (in grace period). If that's the case, the monitor is naturally marked as "down". Keep in mind that we are receiving only POST and GET HTTP methods.

7. BONUS TIP: Restart the monitor

Every IT-person knows that sometimes, "restarting" is the only thing that helps. If everything failed, try to pause->start your monitor. If that's fail too, just let us know.