JetPack sending hundreds of emails saying my site’s down, then back up

Email A:

Your site appears to be down

johnwhiteillustrator.com did not load when Jetpack Monitor last checked on it.
What's happening?

Your site is responding intermittently, or extremely slowly. This can indicate an overloaded, under-powered, or misconfigured server. Your site is probably loading for some users, but not for everyone.

Error reference: 142945637/intermittent
What should you do now?

Start by visiting your site to see if you're able to load it. Jetpack Monitor may have just recorded a momentary glitch that's since been resolved, and you can ignore this email.

If you're unable to load your site, check your host's control panel or contact their support team: they'll have more detail about what is happening. Be sure to share the error information above with them.

—————-

Email B:

Good news!
Your site is back online.

johnwhiteillustrator.com is now back online! It appeared offline or unresponsive for approximately 50 mins, but everything is back to normal now.

Jetpack Monitor will keep checking your site, and we'll alert you if we detect any additional issues.

Hi @johnnyivan –

The root of this issue is that the Jetpack Connection for your site isn’t working. When we try to test your site’s xmlrpc.php file (which Jetpack uses to communicate with your site), it is timing out after a few requests.

I’d suggest checking if you have any security plugins activated that might be blocking our requests. If not, try contacting your hosting provider and asking them to check their security logs to see if they are blocking or otherwise limiting incoming and outgoing connections over XML-RPC.

Jetpack uses this file to communicate with your site, but some hosts block connection requests to that file.

Our requests look like the following:

– File: https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/xmlrpc.php
– User-agent header: Jetpack by WordPress.com
– IPs: https://jetpack.com/support/how-to-allowlist-jetpack-ip/

Please ask them to allowlist the IP addresses listed above. Note that these IP addresses could change (or more could be added) at any time, which could break your connection to Jetpack. For this reason, we actually discourage allowing specific IPs, although with some hosts it may be the only option.

Let us know what you find out. Once the connection is fixed, the Monitor errors should go away.

Hi There,
Thanks very much for this. I’ve forwarded it to my hosting provider tech support, and am awaiting their thoughts.

John

My hosting provider tech support has written back to me:

“I think the developer testing might be negatively impacted by geoip blocking. Can you confirm what country they are based in? I’ll need to see about allowing it full access to the domain.”

Any thoughts?
Thanks,
John

Hi @johnnyivan

Jetpack servers are located in the USA. Could you ask the hosting support what they need to confirm that the IPs were allowed on the GeoIP, please?

Let me know if you have any questions.

My best regards,

Michelle

Hi again,

My host support just got back to me:

“I can confirm that it’s not being blocked. In relation to xmlrpc.php I can confirm that access is blocked but the jetpack plugin shouldn’t require that to function. I can confirm that there are a number of other websites on the same server using Jetpack successfully.”

What should I do next?
John

Hey @johnnyivan

Actually, Jetpack relies on the connection to the xmlrpc.php file for most of the functions, including the monitoring.

If the file is blocked, then your Jetpack will send you notification emails because it is not able to reach the site correctly.

What we can do is deactivate the Jetpack Monitor for you to avoid the emails, and recommend you another service like Uptime Robot to monitor your site. The service doesn’t rely on Jetpack.

Let me know your decision.

Hi there,

It has been more than one week since we have heard from you, so I’m marking this topic as resolved. But If you have any further questions or need some more help, you’re welcome to reply here or open another thread.

Hi Michelle,
Nothing has happened on this lately. I just passed your response onto my hosting provider for their comment. I’ll let you all know what they say.

I’m still being bombarded daily with emails about the site going up and down. This doesn’t happen wit my other WP sites, on the same hosting, with JetPack. Maybe notification emails are just turned off for those. I’ll check.

Thanks,
John

I have the same issue but in my case my site has already been shutdown. And I cannot even setup for notification. So what I can do is to just block the support email.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Jason.

Doesn’t look resolved to me, but I am also in the same boat. My error message is Error reference: 179743876/intermittent.

There is a jetpack debug tool here that can test whether the xmlrpc connection is working:
https://jptools.wordpress.com/debug/

Automatic support elsewhere indicates the following:
“It seems like there is a misbehaving bit of code somewhere in your site that’s impacting your xmlrpc.php. Here’s what it looks like currently:?

• https://_YOUR_URL_/xmlrpc.php?for=jetpack

As you can see, there’s a blank page, which suggests that some plugin, theme, or your wp-config.php file has extra blankspace before the first “<?php” in the file.

This problem is another symptom of a more common problem: the “Headers already sent” problem. You can find more information on that?here.

Can you check your?wp-config.php?file, theme files, and plugins for that whitespace? As mentioned in the document linked above, you will need FTP access.

Once you’ve fixed the whitespace issue, your?xmlrpc.php?(https://_YOUR_URL_/wp/xmlrpc.php?for=jetpack) should look exactly like this:

• https://wp.cloud/xmlrpc.php

There’s a message saying?XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only. That’s the correct message.”

There is a bunch of info here on how to enable/disable xmlrpc at this link. i am just starting to investigate this though so proceed at your own risk.
https://www.greengeeks.ca/tutorials/how-to-enable-and-disable-xmlrpc-php-in-wordpress-and-why/

there’s a video here of someone troubleshooting this issue as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oebrip3wjo

Automatic support has suggested to disable plugins and change theme to a default and see if that solves the issue, and then go back to your theme, check again, and then enable plugins one by one, checking each time. What I didnt realize is you can use the xmlrpc url in the first support response to check at each stage instead of waiting for the problem to occur on its own. Could have been more clear but I suppose it is logical.

I am hoping this is due to some security plugin in my case, though I havent seen it yet, but wouldnt it be nice to actually get as much information as possible when you ask for support? Anyway…

Hopefully this helps, I am reconstructing my own house of cards over here, will report back if I find anything else useful.

Hi @eaec –

If you need assistance, could you please start your own thread, as per the Forum Welcome guidelines?

https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/jetpack#new-post

Thank you!

I’ve managed to sort my issue with some digging, just adding some info that I didn’t see here. In my case it was a Really Simple SSL Pro setting that was the culprit.

Excellent, I’m glad it is resolved.

If you need assistance with Jetpack in the future, please open a new thread.

I am also getting the same error regarding my site. I am afraid my site is getting offline and it will lose ranking.

I am getting this error:

Your site appears to be down

your site did not load when Jetpack Monitor last checked on it

Your site is responding intermittently, or extremely slowly. This can indicate an overloaded, under-powered, or misconfigured server. Your site is probably loading for some users, but not for everyone.

Error reference: 176531293/intermittent

@lastsplash please see if you can help me with this error reference code

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by jamesjohnson99.