Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!
If you are Experiencing issues with a Pi-hole install that has non-standard elements (e.g you are using nginx, apache2 or another reverse proxy, or there is some other aspect of your install that is customised) - please use the Community Help category.
Expected Behaviour:
I’ve been having an issue with my pi-hole overnight. Just around 11:00 PM a ton of forwarded requests to my unbound service, much more than usual then no traffic until I woke up and rebooted both router and Pihole. I would expect it to continue running and my router & Pihole to be online overnight.
- 6.12.62+rpt-rpi-v8
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
Actual Behaviour:
Spike at 11:00 PM and then losing all network on router and pi-hole
Debug Token:
https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/3Ewtn38m/
I can see 2 things on the logs:
-
Pi-hole was running all the time:
Your debug log shows Pi-hole was running until 5:30 am, then it was terminated (by the OS - /sbin/init) and immediately started again (it looks like a restart command):
2026-01-30 05:30:03.777 PST [12979M] INFO: Asked to terminate by "/sbin/init" (PID 1, user root UID 0)
2026-01-30 05:30:03.832 PST [12979/T12980] INFO: Terminating database thread
2026-01-30 05:30:03.859 PST [12979/T12982] INFO: Terminating resolver thread
2026-01-30 05:30:03.887 PST [12979/T12983] INFO: Terminating timer thread
2026-01-30 05:30:04.083 PST [12979/T12981] INFO: Terminating GC thread
2026-01-30 05:30:04.334 PST [12979M] INFO: Finished final database update
2026-01-30 05:30:04.335 PST [12979M] INFO: Waiting for threads to join
2026-01-30 05:30:04.341 PST [12979M] INFO: Thread webserver (7) is idle, terminating it.
2026-01-30 05:30:04.341 PST [12979M] INFO: All threads joined
2026-01-30 05:30:05.050 PST [12979M] INFO: PID file emptied
2026-01-30 05:30:05.058 PST [12979M] INFO: Stored 2 API sessions in the database
2026-01-30 05:30:06.499 PST [12979M] INFO: ########## FTL terminated after 23h 59m 53s (code 0)! ##########
2026-01-30 05:30:07.009 PST [15599M] INFO: ########## FTL started on pihole6! ##########
Pi-hole was restarted again (probably by you???), around 6:30 am (the log shows Pi-hole running under a different PID):
2026-02-01 06:34:51.933 PST [639M] INFO: PID of FTL process: 639
-
apparently the network was not sending queries to Pi-hole between 23:10 and 6:20.
Are you sure the router was on?
If the router was turned off, the devices would not be able to send queries to Pi-hole, even if Pi-hole was running all the time.
I’m fairly certain the router was on.. I have it set to reboot at 2:00 AM, so unless it had trouble telling time (or is set for eastern instead of pacific..) when I woke up it was on but had an issue saying there was no internet. I’m going to not have it restart tonight and see if that changes anything.
hello, would you mind taking a look at another log? this time just the Pihole became unresponsive at 11:00 pm, the router did not go offline. I had to power cycle the raspberry pi in the morning at ~7:10 https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/J9oIoa3p/
The new log shows Pi-hole was restarted around 22:48 (the log doesn't show the exact start time, but it was around this time):
2026-02-03 22:48:59.828 PST [577M] INFO: PID of FTL process: 577
And it also shows sqlite3 recovering some data:
2026-02-03 22:48:59.996 PST [577M] ERROR: SQLite3: recovered 441 frames from WAL file /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db-wal (283)
This usually happens when the machine is not properly shutdown... maybe it was a power failure (I can only guess).
Pi-hole itself seems to be working as expected, but you need to investigate if the machine was restarted at 22:48.
Thanks so much, don’t believe we had a house wide power failure but maybe it’s time to wipe the pi and just set up fresh to get any ghosts in the machine figured out
As I said, this is just a guess.
The only thing I can say for sure is: the log shows Pi-hole was restarted at 08:26:39 and again around 22:48:59.
Not sure if it was restarted more times during the day (the debug log shows only a few lines).
Also I'm not sure if this is a power failure (bad power source?), or something else (like a service) or someone else is restarting the system.
