What changed right before my website broke?
Updated 2026-10-16
Short answer: almost every sudden break follows a change: a deploy, a DNS edit, a setting flipped at Cloudflare or the host, a plugin update. Put the time the errors started next to the list of changes before it. The last change before the first error is your prime suspect.
How to check it yourself
- Find when it started: your server's error log, your uptime alerts, or the first client email.
- Check deploys: your host's or Git provider's deploy history for that window.
- Check DNS: compare the current records with what you expect. A missing A record or a changed CNAME is common after a "quick" change.
- Check account changes: Cloudflare keeps an audit log (Manage Account, then Audit Log), and most hosts have one too.
- Undo the last change before the first error and see if the errors stop.
What Preventionlabs shows
The last 14 reports per site are kept, and each one shows what changed since the one before, so a new problem appears next to the report where it wasn't there. With a read-only Cloudflare token, the same report also lines up in one place: the server errors visitors got, by address and time; the latest production deploys and whether they succeeded; changes made in the Cloudflare account in the last 72 hours, from its change log; and DNS records compared every hour, so any added, removed or changed record is caught. For example, from a real report: 29 errors 523 on / in 24 hours, next to the deploys before them and a CNAME switched from one Pages project to another.
Price
First report free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains.