I have been searching extensively for an answer, but cannot find anything.
Over the last few days Cloudflare has been blocking a lot of traffic from Germany. I have numerous complaints from my German customers, but not from all of them, that they are getting status 403 in accessing our website. I have checked the logs on the origin server and these 403 responses are not coming from the origin server.
This did not start when we made changes to our site. It was previously tested from Germany as well as widely around the world with no errors. We have made no changes about the time of onset of this problem.
I have tried to turn off WAF, but cannot find anywhere to do so. If I pause Cloudflare I start getting problems with SSL certificates, so this is not a good option for me.
I think that if I could just turn off WAF this might help, but I can find no way to do that.
Does anyone else have experience of this problem? It is a show stopper for us, as we are trying to get German customers to activate software purchases via our domain name.
Further update: our ISP added a firewall rule to block Germany from an entire server without communicating with those of us who have shared accounts on that server!! Resolved now and nothing to do with Cloudflare.
Are you able to check under Security Events?
From there, you should be able to find which security feature is the one that blocking the requests.
Then you can create bypass path or IPs or countries for the specific security feature.
I have since discovered that I was wrong about this. I believed that since I could not see any 403 responses in my origin site web logs that they must be coming from Cloudflare. However, eventually one of my German customers emailed me a screenshot of the 403 response page, and it was clear that it did not carry any Cloudflare branding. Sure enough the origin server had a firewall rule that was blocking traffic from Germany, and also this meant the traffic never hit my domain name on the server so there was nothing in my origin site web logs. I resolved the issue by getting my ISP to remove the firewall rule.