IFTTT experiencing troubles causing services to become repeatedly disconnected

If you make use of IFTTT for automating certain tasks for your website or other means, you might have noticed some complications this last week surrounding certain services like WordPress. Specifically, you might experience the service constantly becoming disconnected, leading to the daily effort (sometimes multiple times per day) of logging back in to reconnect it again–even though there are no connectivity issues with your website or devices.

It is always good to know that you aren’t alone as we have seen a number of cases now within comments, posts, tweets, and other discussions pointing this exact issue out. Some of our staff have also experienced this as well and can agree with some of the experiences described by others.

@IFTTT fix your WordPress service. It's on the frits again saying every day "You can fix it! WordPress is offline" forcing you to re-connect every…day. Our server hasn't had a downtime in a long time nor a slow spot in a long time. Multiple monitors point to IFTTT's fault 🙂

— TheSa|nt ? (@animevortex) March 29, 2021

So what do you do? Clearly, you don’t want to be glued to manually reconnecting every single day. The first thing, before anything else, is to make sure your website or devices actually aren’t having connectivity issues. Usually (usually…), this error only happens when IFTTT cannot connect to said website or devices. If you can confirm everything is online and healthy (it helps to have other services and tricks connected and functioning just fine), then your issue is likely related to this odd occurrence going around.

It is also helpful at times (if it is a WordPress website) to clear your cache if you have a cache plugin running. This can sometimes cause a conflict, although it would be considered rare.

The next step is to reach out to IFTTT and ask for help. Since there is nothing mentioned on the company’s status page related to this (at the time of this article’s publication), it is likely they aren’t in the know of what’s going on. Head to Twitter, Reddit, or anywhere else to look for a response. Once there is enough chatter going around, someone with the company will eventually pick up on it.

If none of this helps (or you’d like to skip the troubleshooting process completely), we would recommend a few alternative options.

Alternative Option #1: Drop the WordPress service from IFTTT and use RSS instead. Point it to your websites/blog’s RSS feed and that should do the trick in most situations. Although, you may not find it too configurable despite the potential that RSS can bring to the table.

Alternative Option #2: Use an alternative service, like Zapier, for any automation that IFTTT seems to be having trouble with. We name Zapier as an example since it offers an incredible amount of customization to your automations that make IFTTT looks like a K-12 program for kids. The only catch is that Zapier only allows up to 100 triggers a month for free and it gets kind of expensive from there if your website isn’t bringing in a profit. So it does kind of limit it businesses and professionals.

This isn’t the first time that IFTTT has had troubles with certain services like WordPress (we are zeroing onto that one specifically since it is the only one members of our staff have experienced). The response isn’t always as quick when this does happen as it can sometimes go on for weeks before it is fixed. One example can be found in the following Tweet during another time multiple case scenario that was going around last year.

@IFTTT The WordPress channel goes offline no matter how many times I fix it.

— ??????? (@yoshi_h21) June 11, 2020

There has been no response from IFTTT on the matter, so there is no telling what the exact cause may be. In our own tests, we have found that IFTTT’s website has demonstrated troubles connecting in general, around the very moment the notification pops up within the app or email. If you are fast enough at clicking the link once the notification comes through you may be faced with 502 Bad Gateway error.

If you have attempted the above troubleshooting and are still met with this problem almost daily (and especially if you’ve seen this 502 Bad Gateway error), then you can relax knowing that you aren’t alone and that the problem is on IFTTT’s end.

Feel free to share your thoughts or experiences in the comments below.

Update (5/31/2021): We’ve actually had a number of colleagues run into this since the story first broke. IFTTT’s WordPress service seems to still be having these issues to this very day. We’ve also seen additional personal experiences pop up in places like Reddit. At this point, we decided to update the story to recommend at least one alternative service to IFTTT to expand your horizons. It doesn’t seem like IFTTT has any interest in looking into the matter so it might be time to let them go and move on.