Cloudflare says my nameservers are not correct (even though they are) and I’ve made zero changes on GoDaddy - suddenly this morning it was finding ancient nameservers that haven’t been used in about 5 years. My website was offline for several hours while Cloudflare said “Pending Nameserver Update” for nameservers that had 100% NOT been updated. It told me to delete other nameservers (dns.pair.com and ns8.ns0.com) but those nameserver did not exist on GoDaddy and hadn’t been used in years. Why would Cloudflare be seeing these “phantom” ancient nameservers? After a manual refresh, they went away and my site came back online, but I need to understand what happened so I can make sure this doesn’t happen again.
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
Checked nameservers on GoDaddy (which were correct, and had not been changed)
What feature, service or problem is this related to?
Nope, logged in to GoDaddy it ONLY showed the correct Cloudflare ns1 and ns2 nameservers. GoDaddy never showed dns.pair.com or ns8.ns0.com. There was nothing to refresh on GoDaddy, as we never changed anything there and never saw these mysterious other nameserver records.
When I went to the Cloudflare Overview page (which said my nameservers were not set, even though they were), I clicked the button to refresh the nameservers, or check again, or whatever the button says, it gave me the error above saying to “delete the other nameservers” (even though there were no other nameservers to delete on GoDaddy).
As I was messaging the client back about this, I refreshed the page – literally just refreshed my browser page, and suddenly it now said Active again. We never changed a thing on either end; it just spent half the day offline, seeing these two mystery nameserver records.
Ah - yeah I had checked whois this afternoon and saw that it still showed the correct (and ONLY the correct) cloudflare nameservers. I did NOT notice the Updated On date - so that is great, thank you.
In our troubleshooting and talking with the client, we were starting to suspect it being an issue on GoDaddy’s side, and I think this confirms it pretty well. Unless it was a goofy CF bug. We’ll check with GoDaddy and see if we see anything suspicious with nameserver activity today. Thank you for your help!
