Why does Cloudflare block websites?

How do I unblock Cloudflare?

Click here and follow the steps on your phone to download and install the app.

Note that you'll be logged in to your Cloudflare account.

Cloudflare is currently not supported on your device (iPad, iPhone). If you have an unsupported operating system, please visit our other pages: Mobile Website: Unblock Cloudflare. IOS: Unblock Cloudflare. Android: Unblock Cloudflare. Windows Phone: Unblock Cloudflare. What is Cloudflare? Cloudflare makes it simple to protect the people who use your websites. Cloudflare works with the technologies you already use to protect your sites from malware, spam, DDoS attacks and more.

Why should I unblock Cloudflare? If you're running your website through Cloudflare, you already know that your content is served from their infrastructure. But Cloudflare also helps protect your website from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, web scraping, spam and cross-site scripting. Cloudflare gives you the opportunity to learn more about the people who visit your website by giving you the ability to see how users around the world access your website. All data is anonymous, and they use modern security technology to keep your user data safe.

Your website's traffic is split in many places before it gets to your website. If it passes through Cloudflare, it is encrypted and stored in their servers. If the website uses Cloudflare as a DNS (Domain Name System) provider, then Cloudflare knows where your website resides and can route traffic accordingly. The more Cloudflare can understand your traffic, the better it can protect your website. Learn more about Cloudflare Protecting the website is only the start. What about your visitors and users? Let us show you how Cloudflare protects them too. In the end, Cloudflare aims to make the internet a better place. This starts by protecting your site. They don't interfere with your site at all. Instead, they focus on helping you find out who is visiting your website.

Why does Cloudflare block websites?

Cloudflare does not block websites.

All of the websites you see listed on this site are listed because they have been targeted by a botnet. A botnet is a group of computers that have been infected by malware. This malware installs a small web server on the computer that acts as a gateway. This gateway sends requests to the botnet computers and receives traffic from them.

Why would Cloudflare do this? This was done to try and block all web traffic originating from IP addresses of infected computers. When users type an IP address of an infected computer, we will send traffic to the real Cloudflare IP address. This will cause our DNS server to take back control of the website from the botnet and direct web traffic to the real website.

As a note: Our own servers do not receive any traffic when a website is blocked. Cloudflare does not need to take over control of a website in order to block it. We simply stop DNS requests that resolve to Cloudflare's IP addresses. Cloudflare will never block our servers or our DNS servers from resolving DNS requests.

How many computers are affected? Over half a million websites that use our DNS are listed on this site. We have received reports of malware affecting over 5,500 IP addresses since 2026. Most sites have at least one malware infected IP address and a couple sites have hundreds of IP addresses.

What makes a site infected with malware? Several things make a site infected with malware. A few common symptoms are: High CPU and/or disk activity. Frequent attempts to load a page of a website. Attempts to load javascript and html files. High DDoS loads. High memory usage. Low traffic (or no traffic at all). Why are all of these symptoms bad? A high CPU or disk activity means that the malware is trying to process requests that it receives. Often times we see a web site that has some kind of web browser or a search engine. Each time a request comes in, the malware sends the request back to a web server hosting the website. This usually causes 100% CPU usage, high disk activity, high memory usage, and very high traffic. The malware is only running to process a request, it is not consuming computing resources or bandwidth. Since this is a small operation it doesn't even cause network traffic to be generated.

How do I get unbanned from Cloudflare?

I was banned for spamming after I posted on "A Question from a Moderator".

I know I made an attempt to fix the spelling of the post which resulted in an IP ban so I was thinking that this was probably how I got banned. I didn't know if I could write more until the ban was removed, if I just post it on the forum, do I get spammed? I think there is some really important information in the post that can help me get back on cloudflare.

I know I have had trouble with Cloudflare before and I have seen people get unbanned. This is why I am posting here because of its importance to me. I have been using CF for years. Maybe the moderator doesn't want to be involved with the CF community anymore. That's fine but maybe they can put in an auto-ban feature? Not sure if anyone knows or I can find this option.

For you, it's a matter of your account history and your overall reputation - it doesn't really matter what you say here. So you're on your own unless someone who has access to your account comes here to fix it for you. There's no special way to undo a CF decision.

Posting comments about moderators will not help much. If you were spammed, the most likely explanation is that you posted an IP address at some point (an attack against a customer). The IP addresses usually remain banned (this is deliberate - it is necessary to prevent attacks). As you can see, Cloudflare considers IP addresses as very risky data. As such, you were banned immediately upon sending an IP address (unless you send a human-readable address first, then the IP address is deleted from their system). However, these bans are usually temporary as long as you try not to send IPs in the future.

Even if a spamming IP address does end up in your account history, it shouldn't get you into too many more troubles. It would most likely take hours or days for your accounts to become blocked again due to that specific address.

In our opinion, Cloudflare handles IP banning properly (as we all know, spammers often change IPs in order to continue targeting users).