Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try again later. IP address: 176.199.209.167 ≠ 172.70.240.92 Time: 2025-04-07T14:27:27Z URL: https://www.der-postillon.com/
What is the issue you’re encountering
Hello, we run the Blogger-based website der-postillon.com. We use the blog in combination with Cloudflare and experienced a site outage on April 7th around 4:00 PM (local time) affecting all users. The following error message was displayed (IP addresses varied): Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try again later. IP address: 176.199.209.167 ≠ 172.70.240.92 Time: 2025-04-07T14:27:27Z URL: https://www.der-postillon.com/ Upon reviewing our Blogger statistics, we noticed that on the mentioned day we had around 200,000 additional homepage views compared to usual. These views were not linked to any article content. Additionally, we observed an unusual spike in traffic from the Netherlands (185,000 compared to just a few thousand normally), and a disproportionate number of Windows users. We have been using Cloudflare for a few months now, and in this context, we’ve also noticed unusually high access numbers from the United States, which we also suspect might be related to Cloudflare. At this point, we are unsure what caused the outage and those views from the Netherlands and USA. Could you provide any insight or guidance? Thank you in advance!
The web traffic (when using Cloudflare) is travelling in different ways, than compared to if your website is running without Cloudflare.
Without Cloudflare, or with Unproxied () / DNS-only records: Visitor ↔ Web server
With Proxied () records: Visitor ↔ Cloudflare ↔ Web server
This one is a classic Google error message.
Cloudflare is based in the United States, and it is likely appearing like that, because you’re not restoring original visitor IPs.
Google / Blogger sees Cloudflare IP addresses, when someone is visiting your website (through Cloudflare).
As such, many (if not all) of Google / Blogger’s security systems will be flagging traffic based on the Cloudflare IP address, and not the actual visitor IP address.
A heavy spike from a local area might mean that Google / Blogger’s security systems are blocking, or rate limiting Cloudflare IP addresses (temporarily), and that is likely the reason to the error message you saw.
I will therefore suggest you contact Google / Blogger, and ask them:
How you can either lift the restrictions / rate limits for Cloudflare IP addresses.
How you can disable the rate limiting for your Google / Blogger service.
How you can add Cloudflare as a “trusted” service, and restore the original visitor IPs, so that Google / Blogger is rate limiting based on them.
Some of these options will typically be necessary, for you to be able to have a pleasant experience, with the Google / Blogger service, behind Cloudflare.
) / DNS-only records: Visitor ↔ Web server
) records: Visitor ↔ Cloudflare ↔ Web server