Fixing Cloudflare Error 522

One of my website has been running Cloudflare without issue. However, just today I have found that I was not able to log into my WordPress Admin pages. The website would not load and instead give a boilerplate Cloudflare Error 522 message.

After researching many many webpages and forums that relate to the issue. I have come up with some standardized way of solving Cloudflare Error 522. And how I managed to fix it at the end. The solution was much to my surprise. In short, it was Cloudflare’s Page Rule options that caused the issue. I do not know why or why, but removing the page rule solved the problem of Error 522 failed connection for me.

The look of the problem:
You will not be able to login to your WordPress website using your home account or IP. However, other people may be able to access it. You can also access yourself through mobile devices or other internet connection.

Actual Cloudflare Error 522 Message

A 522 error occurs because CloudFlare could not make a TCP connection to your origin server before the attempts timed out. This means that CloudFlare was unable to send the HTTP request to the origin because a network connection to the origin server could not be established.

This problem may happen for various reasons:

-Rate limiting incoming connections from CloudFlare’s IPs.
-A process on the webserver is consuming all of one or more resources at the origin.
-The domain is on a shared hosting platform where traffic or tasks for a separate domain on the same server is taking up one or more resources.
Network connectivity issues between CloudFlare and the origin web server.

Message Explained and Potential Causes / Solutions

Now based on this message, you can conclude that the problem probably is not on your end user side. However, the problem lies on the “connection” between Cloudflare and the origin server which is your site hosting provider. Now, it could either be an issue with Cloudflare or the origin server settings.

What is Error 522
It is basically saying that Cloudflare was able to connect to your web server. But for some unknown reason that connection timed out before the connection was able to be completed. The reason may be due to slow connection or denied connection. No one really knows.

Potential Causes:
1. Your WordPress Plugins causing certain pages to not load correctly, thus fail to send Cloudflare the correct information.
– Disabled all plugins.
2. WHM or CPanel has firewalls that limit the rate of connections.
– Checked all IP’s and Firewalls, whitelisted my IP and Cloudflare’s IP
3. Certain IP’s have been denied.
– Same as above.
4. Server’s resources have been overloaded with shared site hosting.
– Checked other site on the server, only 1 site had Error 522. I had other WordPress setups using Cloudflare using the same dedicated server.

So you can look into these potential causes after you login and manage your server. However, in my case I had a dedicated server and no settings have been changed. I still did my due diligence and trouble shoot all of the above potential areas of errors.

None of which solved the problem.

How I Solved My Cloudflare Error 522 + WordPress
After hours of testing and trouble shooting. I came upon a forum thread that claimed to solve the issue by deleting the domain on Cloudflare, reinstall Cpanel, then finally add that domain back to Cloudflare to fix the problem. I figured that was a lengthy way with long downtime for this kind of error. I deduced that one of the moving part must have failed to cause the problem. It seemed that deleting the account on Cloudflare and reinstalling it solved the problem, so maybe it is actually one of the Cloudflare settings.

So I started testing around Cloudflare’s settings and tweaked around the various performance and security configurations. At the end, I was able to fix the error.

What I did was simply contacting my hosting provider to have them make sure that my server does not block any of the Cloudflare’s IP’s.

Other Considerations
Although in our case our Cloudflare Error 522 was caused with a WordPress installation. The issue may rise with any kind of installation, as long as you implement some forms of page rules with your setup. So if your site does experience Error 522 with Cloudflare, the Page Rules configuration may be an area for you to look into.

If You are a website visitor and see error 522

Your best bet is to let the site owner know that this error message has occurred. The chances are that there is nothing for you to do on your end.

However, it has been reported by some that flushing your DNS may solve the issue. If the failed connection occurred due to website migrations for the ones that you want to access. But nevertheless this is an odd situation that does not occur often. So the odds are the the issues are still with the Cloudflare or Website.

Due to the nature of the error, there is a high chance that the site owner nor the hosting companies cannot replicate the error on their end. But if you experience it frequently, it is best for you to contact the website owner directly about it.