Web hosting provider SiteGround experienced a significant four-day long outage beginning on the 8th of November. Finally, they announce it’s over, citing Amazon’s Global Accelerator as the cause.
During the outage, many SiteGround customers lost significant amounts of website traffic and, worse yet, rankings in Google. Many publishers are still upset with the provider, primarily because of the slow pace of resolving the issue.
SiteGround Hosting tweeted on the 12th of November that it had resolved the outage. According to the web hosting company, the problem was isolated to a point between Amazon’s Global Accelerator and Google’s crawler. The AWS Global Accelerator is a tool that speeds up websites by solving network congestions on the web.
SiteGround Hosting had the following to say:
On Friday, we managed to isolate the Google bot crawling issue to a networking problem that was specific only to Amazon’s Global Accelerator and Google’s crawler bot subnet. We implemented a fix that bypasses that problem, and we’re happy to say that our clients’ sites now get properly crawled, and most of them have already returned their rankings. We are still working closely with both Amazon and Google on finding the cause of the problem. Based on the latest updates, we suspect it’s a routing issue, and Amazon is in contact with Google trying to narrow it down. From Amazon, we know there are other clients of theirs that have been affected as well.
SiteGroung Hosting publicly announced the cause of the outage nearly a week after it started, on the 15th of November.
Status Update: On Friday we managed to isolate the Google bot crawling issue to a networking problem that was specific only to Amazon’s Global Accelerator and Google’s crawler bot subnet. We implemented a fix that bypasses that problem.
— SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 15, 2021
The provider followed up with two other tweets, expressing its happiness after resolving the issue:
We’re happy to say that the majority of our clients’ sites are being crawled now, and most of them have already returned their rankings.
The web hosting company also reported that it has successfully fixed the issue:
Аll websites hosted on our end were fully operational, and there were no DNS resolution issues with the requests submitted from any other service.
However, that wasn’t the end of it. SiteGround Hosting customers are still agitated, flooding the platform with negative tweets. They are still writing about the slow pace of website traffic recovery.
Furthermore, some websites still appear to be affected, losing more traffic. However, that issue cannot be assigned to SiteGround, but delays in the DNS system instead.
When a website disappears for some time, Google begins removing it from its index. SiteGround customers experienced this during the outage. Fortunately, Google’s crawler, Googlebot, occasionally checks whether the website reappeared. When a site returns after a while, the full recovery can take up a few to ten days, depending on how many web pages need to be re-crawled.
