"You can check the status of the Cloudflare outage over here but the outage will serve a 5xx server error to Googlebot and other search bots. Those bots will pick up that error and slow down and decide to come back later. We covered this topic both for individual sites and larger outages numerous times. If the outage continues on for days, then sure, it might be a bigger issue for Googlebot and other crawlers."
"In these widespread outages does Googlebot get into a huff about a site if it's returning a 500 for a long duration - is there material damage to rankings? I replied: Google bot has seen this before. It knows to chill for a bit John Mueller from Google added: Yeah. 5xx = Google crawling slows down, but it'll ramp back up. If it stays at 5xx for multiple days, then things may start to drop out, but even then, those will pop back in fairly quickly."
"So yea, this outage is not fun but (1) Cloudflare is working on it and (2) Google and other search engines have a lot of experience handling it as well and all will be fine in the long run. Googlebot knows how to deal with site outages, especially large widespread ones - do not worry - Googlebot and other bots will come back and chew up your content www.seroundtable.com/searchintern...- Barry Schwartz ( @rustybrick.com) November 18, 2025 at 7:31 AM"
Around 20% of websites use Cloudflare, and major Cloudflare outages return 5xx server errors to Googlebot and other search crawlers. Search crawlers detect 5xx responses, reduce crawl frequency, and schedule retries rather than immediately penalize sites. Search engines have established behavior to slow crawling during widespread outages and then ramp back up once errors resolve. If 5xx errors persist for multiple days, some pages may temporarily drop from index or rankings, but those pages typically recover quickly when service is restored. Cloudflare is working on the outage and long-term ranking damage is unlikely unless outages continue for several days.
Read at Search Engine Roundtable
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