Uptime Basics keeps monitoring during an extended outage, but it can temporarily reduce repeated work that no longer provides new information. When an automatic adjustment affects what you see, the dashboard and Monitor Details page show a notice explaining the active change.
Why automatic protections exist
A website that remains unavailable can produce thousands of nearly identical failed checks, repeated diagnostic runs, and duplicate notifications. Continuing all of that work at the original rate does not usually help you resolve the incident faster.
Automatic protections are designed to:
- Keep checking for recovery.
- Preserve useful check and incident history.
- Avoid sending the same outage notification repeatedly.
- Reduce repeated diagnostic work during a long-running incident.
- Restore the configured schedule automatically when the website recovers.
An adjustment does not turn an Up result into Down or hide a successful recovery.
These are fair-use and reliability safeguards, not usage overage charges. They apply consistently across Starter, Plus, and Pro, and a customer does not need to upgrade a plan to clear them.
Check intervals during a long incident
The configured interval remains unchanged in the monitor settings. Uptime Basics may use a temporary effective interval while an incident stays open:
| Incident duration | Temporary behavior |
|---|---|
| Less than 24 hours | Keep the configured check interval. |
| 24 to 72 hours | Monitors configured faster than 5 minutes temporarily check every 5 minutes. |
| More than 72 hours | Monitors configured faster than 15 minutes temporarily check every 15 minutes. |
| Recovery detected | Restore the configured interval automatically. |
Monitors already configured at a slower interval are not made faster by this protection.
Repeated timeout protection
If a target repeatedly uses the full timeout without responding, Uptime Basics can limit the timeout used for follow-up regional confirmation checks. The primary availability check continues to use the timeout you selected, while the shorter follow-up checks help keep one difficult target from delaying later work.
The Monitor Details page displays a notice while this follow-up protection is active. Review the target URL, firewall rules, request method, custom headers, authentication, and timeout setting if the failures continue.
In unusually sustained timeout conditions, a monitor may be paused automatically. The dashboard identifies it as Paused and the Monitor Details page explains why. Review the configuration before activating it again.
Notification and diagnostic limits
Uptime Basics sends notifications for meaningful state changes rather than every failed request. Current safeguards include:
- A 15-minute cooldown between repeated Down notifications.
- A maximum of six state-change notifications per hour for a monitor.
- A six-hour baseline cooldown between repeat deep-diagnostic requests for the same incident.
During unusually high sustained account activity, repeated notifications or diagnostic runs can be limited further. Availability checks, results, and incident history continue at the effective monitoring interval, and the dashboard shows an account-level notice when this protection is active.
The account-level activation thresholds are security and operations controls rather than customer quotas. Uptime Basics does not publish them as plan allowances because doing so would make them easier to evade or misuse. The customer-visible notice instead identifies the behavior that changed.
What you will see
The dashboard may show labels such as:
- Extended outage: 5 min checks or Extended outage: 15 min checks
- Timeout adjustment active
- Automatically paused
- Monitoring and notification protection active
Monitor Details provides the fuller explanation, including the configured interval and temporary effective interval when applicable.
What you should do
- Open the monitor from the dashboard.
- Review the failure diagnosis and latest incident.
- Check Detailed Logs for HTTP, DNS, TLS, timeout, or regional evidence.
- Confirm the URL, request method, accepted status codes, headers, and authentication settings.
- If the target blocks automated checks, update its firewall or security-service rules.
- If the monitor was automatically paused, activate it after correcting the cause.
You do not need to recreate the monitor to restore its configured interval. Long-incident interval adjustments clear automatically after recovery.
When to contact support
Contact Uptime Basics Support if an adjustment remains visible after the target has recovered, or if the effective behavior does not match the notice. Include the monitor name, monitored URL, approximate recovery time, and a screenshot of the notice. Do not include passwords or authorization-header values.