On February 20, 2025, at 16:22 UTC, StatusGator detected an outage affecting Vultr. The issue appeared to stem from a DNS failure, causing vultr.com and any other services hosted on its domain to become inaccessible. But what does that include? The official Vultr status page.
Because Vultr hosts its status page on status.vultr.com, the same domain hosting its primary website and dashboard, users were left without an official source of updates during the outage. Notably, Vultr never acknowledged the incident on their status page which primarily publishes incidents affecting hosted instance availability (unaffected by this incident).
It’s still unclear whether they even knew about the outage, whether it was an issue in their system or an issue upstream, and whether it affected all of their DNS or just their own domain name.
The Importance of a Separate Domain
This incident serves as a critical reminder: Your status page should always be hosted on an independent domain to ensure users can access outage updates even when your primary domain is affected. When DNS issues arise, a status page hosted on the same domain becomes unreachable — precisely when customers need it most.
Many organizations make this mistake, assuming their DNS is resilient enough to withstand failures. Even Amazon Web Services uses its primary domain to host its status page. However, as we saw with Vultr today, even well-established providers can suffer from domain-wide DNS failures.
Two prominent providers who have learned from the mistakes of others are GitHub and Cloudflare. Both use separate domains for their pages, ensuring their customers can stay informed even in the event of a DNS outage. (Another not-so-prominent one is StatusGator!)
How StatusGator Provided Early Warnings
StatusGator customers were alerted to the issue by our Early Warning Signals feature, even though there was no official acknowledgement from Vultr. Our status aggregator collects real-world reports from customers and from across the internet, ensuring StatusGator subscribers are alerted to service disruptions as soon as they begin. Here’s a timeline of the outage:
- 16:15 UTC – Initial reports of Vultr services being unreachable.
- 16:22 UTC – StatusGator detected the outage and notified customers.
- 16:22 to 17:00 UTC – Reports continue to emerge across StatusGator, Reddit, and Bluesky. Some specifically indicated that the Vultr status page was also down.
- 17:10 UTC – Outage appeared to be resolving for some users.
- 17:30 UTC – Connectivity largely restored.
Preventing Future Disruptions
Vultr’s outage today highlights a critical best practice: Always host your status page on a separate domain to maintain transparency during outages. Most providers do not follow this very simple best practice to ensure continuous communication with customers.
Additionally, relying on a service like StatusGator ensures you stay ahead of outages before providers acknowledge them. Our platform aggregates outage data across multiple sources, allowing users to receive real-time alerts when service disruptions occur. Vultr customers that use StatusGator received an alert about the incident letting them know that the dashboard was unavailable.
If you want to get Early Warning Signals from any of the almost 5,000 services we monitor, sign up for a free trial of StatusGator today.
