Active users is zero every day at midnight

[mostafa ahmed]

I’ve been searching for a solution to this issue but haven’t found one. It appears only one other person has encountered this same problem on a forum but did not provide any solution.

Every day at midnight, the count of active users drops to zero, although this pattern is inconsistent.

As depicted in this image, there are zero active users every day at midnight:
[i.ibb.co...]

However, the session data shows that there are indeed people active at the same time:
[i.ibb.co...]

Moreover, there are new users entering the website also at midnight:
[i.ibb.co...]

The numbers for sessions and new users are low but not zero, so I'm puzzled as to why it's displaying zero active users. Any insights or solutions would be greatly appreciated.

[not2easy]

Hi mostafa_ahmed and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I noticed a few posts mentioning a GA4 bug in the monthly thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

It's heavily bugged for the last 3 months.
Realtime is not working often at all, and often it aggregates all visits in one minute.

That part of the discussion is at the very end of the thread (for now) - but it is off topic there.

[not2easy]

A related problem was posted a few weeks ago, with a fix that might offer a way to deal with your issue: [webmasterworld.com...]

[mostafa ahmed]

the problem solved here is not related to a specific time like my case

my problem is similar to this post here: [webmasterworld.com...]

you can see the pattern here
1 am - 9 am
12 am - 9 am
12 am - 10 am
1 am - 10 am
this hour has zero active users but the hours before like 11 pm have more than 200 users and the hours right after 9 pm or 10 pm also have more than 200 users

[not2easy]

How does GA4 data match up with your access logs? If the end traffic data is the same as your data but different from the time period, that indicates the GA4 data is lagging, not omitting the data. This is what the people in that monthly thread are seeing and referring to as a GA4 bug.

If your log data is significantly different from GA4 data (overall) you might want to look into determining human vs. non human traffic.

[DixonJones]

Hi Mostafa,
I will offer a different possible avenue to look at. Your hosting company may carry out a routine at midnight most days, which might be destroying your triffic or maybe the tracking system you use. One idea is to use a website monitoring service (there are loads).... These ping your site every X minutes to make sure it is still responsive. If it isn't, it can text you or alert you. If your host is messing up every day, you will see a log of it. Even if this is not the cause, I recommend using a service like this... even if you use the free options.