Cloudflare calling /.well-known/acme-challenge/ files that don't exist

Website, Application, Performance
1

What is the name of the domain?

rehobby.com.au

What is the error number?

[2316647] [T0]

What is the error message?

File not found [/home/*/public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge/NDK-? ULH5kN1r_miTuXtdGG3x2hTp6N_-k4pR0Iei3pc]

What is the issue you’re encountering

I only just signed up for this account, I wasn’t using cloudflare. But cloudflare is trying to call /.well-known/acme-challenge/ files that don’t exist and causing I/O errors. How can I stop cloudflare from trying to call these files on my website? I had WPForms installed too, but I didn’t have the cloudflare capcha option enabled.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I’ve been trying to solve various issues where I’m reaching my I/O limit. Disabling plugins hasn’t helped, and my host’s support mentioned these call attempts from cloudflare.
I’ve activated WPforms and turns off all capchas, but I didn’t have cloudflare ones active anyway. Not sure what else it could be.

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

This happens a few times every day.

2

Can you show the IP addresses that are trying to access your site?

If they are in this list…

…then maybe someone has accidentally used your IP address in their Cloudflare DNS. You can block all those IP addresses if you don’t use Cloudflare.

If not in the list, likely someone is using Cloudflare WARP to access your site.

3

Thanks for replying
The IP address comes from the 172.70.x.x range. Is it worth blocking these?

ip addresses
ip addresses85×687 2.59 KB

4

Please make sure that no blocks affect that path because this is used for SSL certificate validation and the files do not exist on your origin server, that is correct, but they do exist on Cloudflare level and need to be free from blocks, redirects and similar:

5

Thanks for replying jochen.

You’re telling me not to block the IPs, but I actually need a solution to this (and my understanding of this is minimal). I don’t use cloudflare, I didn’t even have an account, and my error log is filled with thousands of entries like the ones in the image I’ve uploaded. I’m not sure why Cloudflare is doing this, but it’s actually reducing the usability of my website because I’m hitting my I/O limit (and sometimes others), which is slowing it down. At the moment I’m paying for a website that is barely usable because of this!

I only made this cloudflare account to receive support and there was no way for me to contact support directly, so could I please get some help to resolve this? If blocking the IP addresses won’t help, what will?

My webhost has told me this is an SSL error caused by cloudflare, and has advised me to close any cloudflare account I have. I never had one.

error message
error message1140×82 16.9 KB

6

I would recommend that you log the hostname that is requested and file an abuse report on Cloudflare against that domain.

After you have done that, you could simply block Cloudflare’s IP addresses in your firewall.