Cloudflare timeout error

If you get a Cloudflare timeout 524 error, like in this screenshot:

The issue may be that when a user accesses your website through Cloudflare, the server interprets the incoming request as coming from one of Cloudflare’s IPs and then determines the real IP address of the actual visitor.

Sometimes Cloudflare updates or rotates its IP ranges. If the server’s configuration isn’t updated accordingly, it may start recognizing all incoming requests as coming from Cloudflare’s own IPs — instead of the real client IPs.

In that case, the server might think it’s under attack (because all traffic seems to come from the same IP) and automatically block Cloudflare’s IP address.

To prevent this, the solution is to (ask your hosting provider to) add a script that continuously refreshes Cloudflare’s IP list on the server (eg: once a week), ensuring it always trusts the current Cloudflare IP ranges and doesn’t accidentally block them.