User experiencing random timeouts on Pale Moon and Firefox

What is the name of the domain?

What is the issue you’re encountering

For the past two months now (since 6th December), one of my website’s users has been experiencing intermittent timeouts (several times a day, every other day) when browsing on Pale Moon or Firefox (they do not get this issue on Microsoft Edge). We do not know for sure whether this issue is Cloudflare-related; however, the timing does line up with when Cloudflare introduced Automatic SSL/TLS, so we suspect that this may be the cause. Furthermore, they are able to access another site on the same server (which does not use Cloudflare) just fine - which again suggests that it may be a Cloudflare-related issue.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

  • We have contacted our host, and they were unable to find any issues on their end that would be causing this.
  • I have tried using both Firefox and Pale Moon on my own machine, but I did not experience any timeouts when accessing my site (though it should be noted that I am on Windows 11, while they are on Windows 7).
  • I temporarily reverted recent changes to my website (for example, the addition of a new theme), but this did not resolve the issue.
  • I temporarily disabled the Cloudflare cache - but this did not resolve the issue.
  • They re-set their router, which resolved the issue for two or three days - but it then came back.
  • I have inserted a WAF custom rule to skip their IP range, but this has not resolved the issue.
  • I looked at uploading a custom SSL certificate (i.e. the one used by our host); however, this is only available for Business plans and up (which, as a small hobbyist site, I cannot afford).

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

The user’s agent info for Firefox and Pale Moon is as follows:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/6.7 Firefox/115.0 PaleMoon/33.6.0.1

When accessing the site with either of these browsers, they experience sporadic timeouts.

As a bit of an update to this, I tried lowering the SSL/TLS security level from ‘Full (Strict)’ to ‘Full’, and then to ‘Flexible’. I was pretty nervous about this, because I know Cloudflare strongly recommends against ‘Flexible’, but I wanted to see if it solved the problem.

It didn’t solve the problem - and thus, I have now reverted this setting to ‘Full (Strict)’.

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