Why Your Website Goes Down at Night (And How to Fix It)

My website keeps going down at night

If your website keeps going down at night, it is almost never bad luck.

Nighttime outages usually happen because automation, background jobs, or traffic patterns collide while no one is actively monitoring the system.

Scheduled maintenance windows

Most platforms schedule maintenance at night to reduce user impact.

This includes operating system updates, database maintenance, container restarts, or infrastructure recycling. If your application cannot restart cleanly, even a short maintenance window can cause downtime.

Why it breaks

• Unexpected restarts
• Services not coming back automatically
• Manual intervention required

How to fix it

• Verify maintenance schedules from your hosting provider
• Use health checks and automatic restarts
• Ensure your app starts cleanly without manual steps

Traffic spikes from other time zones

Night for you may be peak hours somewhere else.

If your infrastructure is sized only for daytime traffic, it can silently fail under nighttime load.

Typical scenarios

• US traffic hitting European servers at night
• Asian traffic peaking while Europe sleeps
• Bots and crawlers running during low-cost hours

How to fix it

• Review traffic by time zone, not local time
• Add autoscaling or resource buffers
• Rate-limit aggressive bots and crawlers

Backup jobs exhausting server resources

Backups are often scheduled at night to avoid user impact.

Unfortunately, backup jobs can saturate disk I/O, consume CPU and memory, or lock databases long enough to make your site appear down.

Why it breaks

• Disk I/O saturation
• CPU and memory spikes
• Long database locks

How to fix it

• Move backups to true off-peak hours
• Throttle backup processes
• Monitor resource usage during backup windows

SSL certificate renewals failing silently

SSL renewals usually run automatically and often at night.

When they fail, your site may suddenly return security errors even though the server itself is still running.

How to fix it

• Test certificate renewals manually
• Add alerts for SSL expiration and renewal failures
• Monitor HTTPS availability, not just server uptime

CDN or DNS issues during low-traffic hours

CDNs and DNS providers also perform maintenance during low-traffic periods.

Propagation delays, cache invalidations, or configuration changes can break access to your site even if your origin server is healthy.

How to fix it

• Monitor from multiple geographic regions
• Track DNS resolution and HTTP availability separately
• Avoid last-minute CDN configuration changes

Why nighttime outages last longer

Nighttime outages are more damaging because no one is actively watching.

Alerts are missed, dashboards are ignored, and incidents often resolve before anyone investigates. This makes root cause analysis difficult and recurrence likely.

How 24/7 monitoring changes the situation

You do not need someone awake all night.

You need automated uptime checks, immediate alerts, and precise timestamps so failures are visible the moment they happen, not the next morning.

Final thought

If your website keeps going down at night, the problem is not the clock.

It is automation running without visibility.

Nighttime outages are predictable, preventable, and easy to diagnose when monitoring never sleeps.