Help! Weird problem for some visitors started recently, and I’m wondering if the re-routing of the Austin Cloudflare system might be the issue, or if it is something else. It’s hard to troubleshoot as I cannot reproduce the error here (on any device, browser, etc), but I’m getting reports from Texas of this issue and we’ve narrowed it down to Cloudflare.
Problem:
While most visitors see the website fine, we’re getting reports from several different members in Texas that they see a blank page when visiting the website. (Links below.) One of these visitors reports intermittent, brief visibility of the site if she refreshes, but mostly blank pages (with no HTML source code). These complaints started a few days ago. Other visitors in Texas (including me) can see the sites fine. The websites are also hosted near Austin, Texas.
Troubleshooting done so far:
We have purged Cloudflare’s cache.
Checking Cloudflare Status - https://www.cloudflarestatus.com - shows that the Austin system in the United States is listed in red as “Re-routed”.
We have verified that it is not a firewall issue, nor a hosting issue. The visitors’ IP addresses are not blocked at the server or firewall, and they can access non-Cloudflare links on the server.
The server hosting the websites has been online continually, and the site accessible to others. Only Cloudflare sites hosted on this server are experiencing this issue.
We’ve worked with a technically-savvy visitor near Austin who sees the blank pages. She tested on multiple devices and browsers at her location. She sees a 100% blank page with no HTML code and no error messages. Refreshing will occasionally show the webpage briefly, but mostly not. We set up an alternate URL with a different domain name (non-Cloudflare) for her to access the exact same page/code on the server, and that works perfectly.
Links:
https://virginialaneapparel.com
https://wholesale.virginialaneapparel.com
https://rrtournaments.com
Non-Cloudflare alternate link to same server/code/files for fishing website above - works perfectly:
https://secure.flatwaremedia.com/estore/rrtournaments/
Conclusions/What we suspect may be happening:
-
We wonder if some visitors in Texas may be re-routed fine, while others may be re-routed through a different Cloudflare system that is having some unknown problem (caching, DNS, etc,) and serving blank pages.
-
Potentially a Cloudflare SSL issue? Though that doesn’t seem as likely as most visitors see the site fine, and our tech-savvy visitor could occassionally see the page load when refreshing multiple times.
-
Potentially a caching issue on Cloudflare that won’t purge/clear correctly due to the re-routing or some other problem at Cloudflare?
Anyone have any ideas/suggestions? Can anyone reproduce this from their end? Does anyone know how long the Austin system will be offline and rerouted? (If we’re right, and this is the culprit, hopefully it will clear up when the Austin system is back online…?)
(Unfortunately, these websites have Cloudflare’s free plan, so we can’t reach out to Cloudflare with a support ticket.)
Thanks in advance, community. I appreciate your insights.
