Server not responding

Updated 11 October 2026

Short answer

"Server not responding" means your request reached nothing that answered: no error page, just silence until the browser or app gave up. The server is switched off or crashed, so overloaded it can't accept connections, out of memory or disk, or a firewall is dropping traffic. Start with your hosting dashboard: is the server running, and are CPU, memory and disk maxed out?

What's the problem

The site or app hangs and then fails with "server not responding", "connection timed out", ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT, or a Cloudflare 522 error. SSH may also hang.

Why it happens

  • The server is off or crashed, after a kernel problem, a hardware fault, or a provider issue.
  • It's overloaded: CPU at 100% or every worker busy. See server overloaded.
  • It ran out of memory and the system started killing processes. See out of memory.
  • The disk is full, so services can't write and stop working. See disk full.
  • A firewall or security group is blocking the port, often after a rule change.
  • The hosting account is suspended or the provider has an outage.

How to fix it

  1. Check the server's status in your hosting or cloud dashboard. Reboot it from there if it's unresponsive.
  2. Look at CPU, memory and disk graphs for the time it stopped responding.
  3. Once you can log in, run top to see what's using CPU and memory, and df -h to check disk space.
  4. Read the system logs (journalctl, dmesg) for crashes or out-of-memory kills around that time.
  5. Check firewall and security group rules still allow ports 80 and 443.
  6. Check your provider's status page for an outage.

What Preventionlabs checks

One click runs the full report on your domain. For this problem it shows whether your site loads, how fast, and where its redirects go; uptime checked every 5 minutes, with an email when the site goes down and when it is back. With Cloudflare connected, it also shows which pages returned server errors (5xx) to visitors, and when; recent deploys and account changes, with their times. It can't log in to your server, so memory, disk and process problems show up in your host's dashboard and logs.

Run your free report

Your first report is free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains. Read-only: it never changes anything.

Sources

  1. Cloudflare: Error 522official docsAn overloaded or offline origin web server drops incoming requests.
  2. procps (man7.org): top(1)manual pageThe top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system.

Related

Why is my website down? Check whether it's down for everyone, read the error on the page, then work through domain, hosting and recent changes. Most outages trace back to one of those. Server overloaded More work than the server can handle: a traffic spike, bots, a runaway process, or a slow query. Find what's using the CPU before upgrading. Out of memory: process killed The server ran out of memory and Linux killed a process to survive, often your app or database. Confirm it in the system log, then find what used the memory. Cloudflare error 522: connection timed out Error 522: Cloudflare couldn't connect to your server in time. The server is overloaded or offline, or a firewall is silently dropping Cloudflare.
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