Intermittent Access Issues for Websites Hosted on Separate Servers

What is the name of the domain?

What is the error number?

520

What is the error message?

Web server is returning an unknown error

What is the issue you’re encountering

I was unable to access the website through a web browser. During the same periods, another website hosted on a different droplet was responding to requests extremely slowly.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

On October 9th, between 11:20 AM and noon, and again today between 3:00 PM and 3:40 PM, I was unable to access the website through a web browser.
During the same periods, another website hosted on a different DigitalOcean droplet was responding to requests extremely slowly.
Both websites are subdomains under the same domain.

Please note that the two servers are hosted on separate DigitalOcean droplets and are completely unrelated.

I successfully SSH’d into both servers, confirming that they were reachable.
I manually restarted and verified that PHP-FPM, MySQL, and Nginx were working correctly on both servers.
I turned off all websocket connections and PHP workers as a precaution.
I restarted both servers, but the issues persisted during the mentioned periods.
I tried Cloudflares “Under Attack” and “Developer” modes to see if that would fix it.
I can confirm that both servers were not under any load on the CPU, RAM and Bandwidth.

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

I am not able to reproduce the issue. It has happened randomly twice, and resolved on its own after about 30-40 minutes.

Screenshot of the error

Screenshot 2024-10-16 161951

If it happens again, PAUSE Cloudflare and test. That’s the simplest way to know whether the problem is at your origin server or at Cloudflare: Pause Cloudflare | Cloudflare Fundamentals docs

You may also review common causes of 520 errors here: Community Tip - Fixing Error 520: Web server is returning an unknown error

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