Pi-hole & router offline overnight

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1

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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

IMG_2158
IMG_21581320×2868 472 KB

IMG_2157
IMG_21571320×2868 476 KB

IMG_2156
IMG_21561320×2868 921 KB

IMG_2155
IMG_21551320×2868 921 KB

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/3Ewtn38m/

2

I can see 2 things on the logs:

  1. 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

  1. 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.

3

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.