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Cloudflare, utilized by roughly 20% of all websites—including this one—is experiencing significant outages this morning. Many website owners are worried about the potential impact on search engine crawlers like Google and Bing. However, these search engines have encountered similar issues before and are equipped to handle them.
You can view the current status of the Cloudflare outage at their status page. During this outage, search bots like Googlebot will receive 5xx server errors, which indicate server-side issues. These errors signal to the crawlers that they need to slow down their crawling process and may cause them to delay revisiting the site until the problem is resolved.
This situation has been addressed multiple times in relation to both individual sites and larger-scale outages. Typically, if the outage persists for several days, it could have a more noticeable effect on the crawling and indexing process. Still, extended disruptions of that length are usually symptomatic of broader underlying problems.
John Mueller from Google recently discussed this on Bluesky when asked whether prolonged 500 errors due to widespread outages cause significant harm to site rankings. He explained that Googlebot is familiar with these situations and tends to “chill” or slow down during such outages. Mueller emphasized that 5xx errors lead to a slowdown in crawling, but this is temporary. Even if errors persist for multiple days, Google and other search engines will generally resume normal crawling once the issues are resolved, and rankings typically recover quickly afterward.
Although this outage is inconvenient, cloudflare’s team is actively working to resolve it. Search engines like Google understand these circumstances and are resilient in handling them. Consequently, there’s little reason for concern that this will cause any long-term damage to a site’s search presence.
A recent tweet from Barry Schwartz confirmed that Googlebot is capable of managing widespread outages effectively and will return to crawling and indexing once the issue is fixed. His reassurance is supported by discussions on Bluesky, where community members acknowledge that such disruptions are temporary and manageable by search engines.
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