What is Cloudflare error 1020?
This particular Cloudflare error code almost exclusively happens on pages that use the Cloudflare CDN to optimize the website and facilitate more security. So basically when the end-user sees the 1020 error, it’s because the IP address was blocked due to security concerns detected by the Cloudflare CDN. Although most of these concerns are typically warranted, there are situations where the IP address is blocked despite the fact that it doesn’t really represent any danger. After investigating this particular issue thoroughly and looking at various user reports, it turns out that there are several underlying causes that might trigger a false positive of this error code: Note: Each of the scenarios presented above assumes a local occurrence on the visitor’s computer interferes with the Cloudflare CDN and triggers a false-positive 1020 error. Legitimate security concerns are not covered in this article. Now that you are familiar with every scenario that might be responsible for triggering the 1020 error due to a local occurrence, here’s a series of fixes that other affected users have successfully used to get to the bottom of this issue:
Make Sure your Browser allows the use of Cookies
It’s important to understand that Cloudflare relies on cookies to customize certain security features on the sites that it’s enabled on. This allows the Cloudflare CDN service to provide visitors with a fast, personalized, and relevant experience. It’s a great feature, as long as it doesn’t end up blocking access to the website for certain users that are using a browser that is actively blocking cookies. In most cases, the use of cookies is blocked by 2 popular scenarios: Depending on the situation that you find yourself in, the fix will vary exponentially. But to make matters easier for you, we’ve created two separate sub-guide that will help you deal with a cookie-related issue that is causing the 1020 error:
Enable Cookies on your browser
Since this scenario is almost exclusively encountered with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome (as well as every other Chromium-based browser), we’ve put together two sub-guides that will walk you through the process of enabling cookie & Cookie data on both browsers:
Enable Cookies on Google Chrome
Enabling Cookies on Mozilla Firefox
Disable Cookie-blocking extensions
Even if your browser is configured to accept cookie content, it’s also possible to see a 3rd party extension or add-on blocking cookies that are considered intrusive – This is true for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Here’s a shortlist of Chrome extensions and Mozilla Firefox add-ons that might be blocking cookies and causing the 1020 error with Cloudflare:
uBlock Origin (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox)Privacy Badger (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox)Ghostery (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox)Disconnect (Google Chrome)Cookies Disable (Mozilla Firefox)Cookie AutoDelete (Mozilla Firefox)Cookiebro (Mozilla Firefox)NoScript (Mozilla Firefox)
If you’re using any of the extensions/add-ons above on Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome (or a similar add-on or extension), follow one of the sub-guides below to prevent it from causing the 1020 error with Cloudflare:
Disable the problematic extension on Google Chrome
Disable the problematic extension on Mozilla Firefox
If none of the potential fixes cookie-related fixes have been effective or applicable in your case, move down to the next potential fix below.
Clear your browser cache
Keep in mind that you can also see this error even in a situation where the webserver is no longer throwing the error – It’s possible to have a copy of this error locally cached (saved) and so your browser is retrieving every time you access it. If you previously faced this error legitimately, it might help to access your browser settings and clear all your cache and cookie data. However, the exact instructions for doing this will be different depending on the browser that you’re using. With some browsers, you will be able to selectively delete the data to only remove the website affected by the 1020 error. To make things easier for you, we’ve put together a guide that will show you how to clear the cache and cookies on the most popular browsers. If you already followed the instructions on clearing the cookies & cache related to the problematic website that’s showing the 1020 error, move down to the next method below.
Contact the site owner
If none of the methods above have allowed you to fix the issue and you’re encountering the issue with every browser that you try, the issue is most likely related to a firewall rule violation. Now, this will be entirely specific to the website in question since the site owner most likely established custom firewall rules that are restricting you from visiting the website. In this case, your only hope of getting past the 1020 error screen is to contact the web administrator and ask them to check the firewall logs and whitelist your IP. PRO TIP: You can typically find contact information by using the Contact us page – Most websites have one. If that doesn’t work and you can’t contact the Contact page, you should do a Whois search in order to find the owner and contact info of the domain owner. You can use the WHOIS-DomainTools service to search for this information.
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