Crossref incident

Main website down between 05:46 UTC and 06:47 UTC

Critical Resolved View vendor source →

Crossref experienced a critical incident on April 17, 2026 affecting Crossref website, lasting 3h 51m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.

Started
Apr 17, 2026, 06:32 AM UTC
Resolved
Apr 17, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC
Duration
3h 51m
Detected by Pingoru
Apr 17, 2026, 06:32 AM UTC

Affected components

Crossref website

Update timeline

  1. investigating Apr 17, 2026, 06:32 AM UTC

    The main Crossref website (www.crossref.org) has been down since 05:46 UTC. We are investigating the cause of the issue.

  2. monitoring Apr 17, 2026, 07:04 AM UTC

    The website is available again. We are monitoring the situation.

  3. resolved Apr 17, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC

    From 05:46 UTC on 17 April we experienced a sustained surge of traffic to our website, which was caused by bot activity distributed across multiple IP addresses. The service recovered automatically without intervention after about an hour, and we have since applied tighter rate-limiting to the source. We are also reviewing options to further improve the scalability and resilience of the service going forward.