By Matt G. Southern
Publication Date: 2026-10-21 20:19:00
Google Search Central is reminding anyone who takes servers offline for PHP patches to return a 503 status code, which tells Google the outage is temporary.
The LinkedIn post went up Wednesday, the day PHP released emergency fixes for two critical flaws that can let attackers run code without logging in.
The post doesn’t say how long a 503 can stay up. Google’s crawl rate documentation recommends against serving one for more than one to two days, because URLs that return it for multiple days may be dropped from the index.
What Google And Mueller Said
Google Search Central wrote:
“Serving a 503 (Service Unavailable) HTTP status code ensures already indexed URLs are preserved in Search while you work. Once you start serving 200 responses again, things naturally return to normal.”
The post also warned against generic 404s or 200 error pages during the downtime. It linked to Google’s page on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers.
In a 2013 post, Google’s John Mueller…