Our checker

What it is

NetOutagesBot is the program that checks whether websites are up for NetOutages. If you found it in your server logs, it requested a website address that is on our list of services, or that someone added to their account to monitor.

How to recognise it

It always says who it is. We do not pretend to be a web browser. Its user agent is:

NetOutagesBot/1.0 (+https://netoutages.com/bot)

What it requests

• One page, the address that was given to us, with a plain GET request. It reads the answer to measure it and does not store the page.
• It follows redirects (up to 10), and checks every step before it goes there.
• Once a minute for the services on our public list. For a website someone added to their own account, as often as that person chose: every 1, 5 or 10 minutes.
• It never logs in, fills in forms, submits anything or crawls links.
• It does not read robots.txt, because it does not crawl: it requests only the one address it was given.

If your site blocks it

That is fine. If your site answers with a challenge page or an error such as HTTP 403 or 429, we record that the site blocks automated checks and mark it as “limited”. We never count it as an outage and we never try to get around it.

If you want it to stop

Tell us the address and we will stop checking it. For a website someone added to their own account, that person can also delete the monitor at any time.