Originally published at https://rnye.tech Hi all, today's post details an interesting problem that faced a website thanks to undocumented Google crawl behaviour that hit us suddenly. The website used Azure Front Door for global CDN/WAF capability but only had one origin - hosted in Azure in the UK South region. This should have been fine given it's a UK-centric site that receives very little global traffic - that is until Google starts crawling you from the West Coast of the US suddenly. Let's dive in. The problem: what Google Search Console was telling us All was well with the site from the UK, cache hit ratios were in the 80%+ range, response times were generally rapid even if cache was missed. Google typically crawled the site thousands of times a day. Then suddenly a ticket came in detailing a drastic drop-off in mid-April. Average response times were never great according to Google (700ms) but they'd suddenly jumped to almost double that number (1.3s) with seemingly no explanation.…