Status code 503

Website, Application, Performance Security
1

Hi,

I do have couple of websites running in Cloudflare. Now, when I do check these websites on https://httpstatus.io/, I see:

Status code
503

Status message
Service Temporarily Unavailable

When I disable Cloudflare, all is working fine.

I talked with the hosting company (Cloudways), and they told me that there is something going on with Cloudflare and I should contact them. That’s what I am doing now.

Can someone please assist why this happening?

1 Like
2

I can’t edit my first post.

The error status code 503 happens with both “http://domain.com” and “http://www.domain.com”.

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3

This will be most likely one of the challenges. Either JavaScript or CAPTCHA. Check your firewall event log for any related entries.

What’s the domain?

4

The domain is REDACTED

When I look in the firewall event, I only see “bot fight mode”.

5

Then it will be most likely that. Try disabling it.

6

That worked, thanks!

Now just to understand it a bit. What is the recommend way? I thought that it’s better to enable bot fight mode in the Firewall settings.

Is it recommend to enable it and that I do get Status code 503. In the browser it’s working fine, but maybe for SEO it’s not good that I do get such error.

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7

It depends on what you need, but with the security layer you can have such challenges and they will return a 503. The 503 itself is not the issue though.

8

Thank you for the help Sandro.

9

One other question, is your “www” record an A record or a CNAME record?

10

My “www” record is a CNAME record.

11

For others that will read this, it’s also good to know when you have “Bot fight mode” enabled, you can’t preload HSTS (https://hstspreload.org/)

After you disable “bot fight mode”, it will work.

For more information:

12

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