Cloudflare pages show as Forbidden

[sudodaemon]

I work at a private school in northern Virginia, and last week something happened that blocked our access to Cloudflare websites. We have 3 campuses, and on 2 of the campuses these websites load properly, but at our high school all these websites show as Forbidden. The only difference is the IP address at each location. Here’s a couple websites I know will not load.

simplypsychology DOT org
allhiphop DOT com

I’m used to seeing CAPTCHA, but now we don’t even get that, it just says “Forbidden”.

Is there any way to fix this? Our psychology teacher is most affected right now without access to that simplypsychology website.

[matteo]

Hello there,

I’m assuming you are seeing a 1020 error page.

If that’s the case your only solution is to contact the site owners’.

[sudodaemon]

Thats the thing… It’s not a 1020 error page… It literally just says “Forbidden”

[sudodaemon]

And I seriously doubt its a website specific firewall rule. It’s happening on multiple Cloudflare sites that have no relation to each other.

[matteo]

Two options, either local IT is blocking it at the school level, or the website owner is. That is definitely not a Cloudflare error.

[sudodaemon]

It’s definitely not IT blocking it. I’ve run the URL through our firewall policy tester and it shows the URL is not blocked. To add, the websites show at our 2 other campuses (down the street and the only difference in networks is the IP, everything else is identical). I was thinking it was the website owner that blocked our IP but I threw that idea out the window when I noticed more sites pulling up “forbidden”. Regardless, I did email the site owner on Friday, but no reply yet.

If it’s not Cloudflare, and its happening on multiple sites… What else could it be?

[matteo]

I’m definitely excluding Cloudflare as when it blocks something it’s always very branded. Can you see the response headers for the request? And the IP it comes from?
DNS might point somewhere else?

[sudodaemon]

Here’s my work machine where the page does NOT load.

I’ll create another reply to show the other picture of my home machine where the page does load.

Obviously, I do see the remote IP it shows is different, what exactly does that mean?

I also changed my DNS servers on my work computer to use Google’s rather than our school DNS server.

[sudodaemon]

This is my home machine where the site does load properly.

[Chaika]

You can see that it’s not a Cloudflare block page since it has a cache status header on it (and the other non-CF headers like x-ezoic).

The common factor with the websites blocking you may be that they use Ezoic Cloud/Ezoic CDN behind Cloudflare.

Specifically, it looks like you may be exceeding their rate limit, as per the “x-ezoic-rate-exceeded” header.

Those two sites you linked (simplypsychology and allhiphop) both seem to use Ezoic. So for whatever reason, they seem to be blocking you/your network.

Edit: For what it’s worth, the second site (allhiphop) that you said doesn’t load doesn’t even use Cloudflare, just Ezoic directly, so it definitely seems it’s on their end.

[sudodaemon]

Thank you for that! I definitely think you are correct because when I try to navigate to Ezoic DOT com I get the same forbidden page.

Off to talk with them. Thank you!