Occasional 403 from a cloudflare server

Website, Application, Performance
1

What is the name of the domain?

What is the error number?

403

What is the error message?

403 nginx

What is the issue you’re encountering

Website inaccessible every x refreshes

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

Temporarily Disabled WAF, checked HTTPS settings

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

When trying to access any URL on my website, eg Explore - Manchester-List I sometimes get a 403 nginx error from a Cloudflare server (not either of my origin webservers as set up in Load Balancing)

The website will sometimes load, but then every third or so attempt, I will get an unbranded 403 error from a Cloudflare server at 104.26.11.67.

3

If you’re seeing a 403 error without Cloudflare branding, this is always returned directly from the origin web server, not Cloudflare, and is generally related to permission rules on your server. The top reasons for this error are:

  1. Permission rules you have set on the origin web server (in the Apache .htaccess for example)
  2. Mod_security rules
  3. IP deny rules. You need to make sure that Cloudflare’s IP ranges :arrow_upper_right: aren’t being blocked
4

Hi Yassine2,

As you’ll note, the response came from a server within Cloudflare’s range so the response was ‘served’ by Cloudflare, via proxy.

I have since found out that the origin server was indeed blocking the IP that I was requesting the site from, on occasion.

The trouble is a new issue: now that we know that the origin server is serving the 403, why is Cloudflare not picking up the 403 and issuing a proper error message and or reflecting the health (or lack thereof) of the load balancer pool?

5

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