Why Your Website Is Up but Your API Is Down (And How to Monitor Them Separately)

One of the most confusing incidents for teams is when the website looks perfectly fine, but customers report that the app or integrations are broken. In reality, your website and API are often two very different systems.

1. Websites and APIs Use Different Infrastructure

Even when they share the same domain, websites and APIs may run on:

Different servers or containers
Separate load balancers
Distinct autoscaling rules

A failure in the API layer doesn’t necessarily affect the website frontend.

2. API Endpoints Are More Sensitive to Errors

APIs often fail due to:

Database connection limits
Background job backlogs
Rate limiting or abuse protection
Upstream service timeouts

Meanwhile, cached website pages may continue loading normally.

3. HTTP Status Codes Can Be Misleading

Many APIs still return 200 OK while embedding error messages inside JSON responses. From a basic uptime check, everything appears healthy.

Without validating the response body, silent API failures go unnoticed.

4. Authentication Makes API Monitoring Harder

APIs often require:

API keys or tokens
Custom headers
Specific HTTP methods

This means a simple “ping” is not enough to confirm real API availability.

5. Why You Must Monitor Websites and APIs Separately

Treating your website and API as a single monitor hides partial outages. Separate monitors allow you to:

Detect API-only downtime instantly
Avoid false confidence during incidents
Alert the right team faster

6. How UptyBots Handles Website vs API Monitoring

UptyBots lets you create dedicated monitors for:

Website availability checks
API endpoints with headers and methods
Response validation beyond status codes

This ensures you know exactly what is down — and why.

Learn More About API Status Codes

Want to understand what different HTTP status codes really mean for your APIs? Use our API Status Code Explainer — a simple guide to interpret API responses and take action faster.

Start improving your uptime today: See our tutorials or choose a plan.