When Netlify Goes Down: A Survival Guide for Your Team
You merge a hotfix to main. The deploy triggers automatically. Twenty minutes later, nothing happened. The build is stuck in "Queued" status. You check Netlify's dashboard — it shows a backlog of builds. Your hotfix is sitting behind 500 other deploys. The production site still has the bug.
What Happens on Your Team
The Frontend Developer
Checks the deploy log — the build hasn't started yet. Retries the deploy — it goes back to the queue. Tries deploying from the CLI — same queue. Considers pushing directly to an S3 bucket as a workaround, then realizes the DNS points to Netlify.
The real cost: When the CDN is down, your site is unreachable and there's nothing to deploy. When the build system is backed up, your hotfix can't go out. Both situations leave you waiting with no workaround. The hotfix that would have taken 5 minutes to deploy now takes 2 hours.
What they should have had: A monitor on the production URL catches CDN outages immediately. A separate monitor on the API catches build system issues. The developer knows right away whether it's a CDN problem (wait) or a build queue problem (find an alternative deploy path).
The PM
The client asks: "Is the fix live?" The developer says: "The deploy is queued." The PM asks: "When will it be live?" Nobody knows. The PM has to go back to the client with "we're waiting on our hosting provider" — which doesn't inspire confidence.
The real cost: Deployment delays are hard to explain to non-technical stakeholders. "Our hosting provider's build queue is backed up" sounds like an excuse. Without visibility into the issue, the PM can't give a timeline or make informed decisions about workarounds.
What they should have had: A status page that shows the deployment state. When the PM can share a link that says "Deployment pending — hosting provider build queue delayed," the conversation shifts from blame to information.
Why Monitor Netlify?
If you deploy to Netlify, your production site depends on their CDN and build system. A Netlify outage can make your site unreachable or prevent new deployments from going live.
What to Monitor
your-site.netlify.appProduction deploymentyour-custom-domain.comCustom domain through Netlifyapi.netlify.comDeployment API (if using CI/CD)What You Should Actually Do
- 1Monitor your production URL — the domain your users visit, not netlify.com
- 2Monitor the Netlify deployment URL (.netlify.app) separately — distinguishes CDN issues from DNS issues
- 3Set up alerts before you need them — don't realize you have no monitoring during an outage
- 4Create a status page for your clients — especially if you host client sites on Netlify
- 5Bookmark netlifystatus.com — Netlify's official status page for platform-wide issues
Netlify's Official Status Page
Netlify publishes real-time status at www.netlifystatus.com. Monitoristic doesn't replace this — it complements it. The official page tells you when Netlify reports an issue. Your own monitor tells you when your connection is affected, often before the status page updates. You also get push alerts instead of checking a webpage manually.
Netlify makes deployment so easy that it's tempting to forget you're depending on someone else's infrastructure. That's fine — until the CDN has an issue or the build queue backs up, and you realize your only deployment path goes through a system you don't control. Monitoring the production URL catches CDN outages. Monitoring the API catches build issues. Both give you answers before your clients start asking questions.
Related Reading
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