Getting a lot of "502 Bad Gateway" errors

[Dan N]

Are captchas turned completely off right now?  Because I've disabled javascript for eevblog and cloudflare and it lets me right through with no challenge and no delay at all even when not logged in.

[tautech]

Only for the record, 502's for an hour of so from ~7-8am Sydney time = NZT -2hrs.

Forum is seemingly back to normal now. 

[Stray Electron]

Only for the record, 502's for an hour of so from ~7-8am Sydney time = NZT -2hrs.

  Any idea why the sudden surge in 502 errors?  I couldn't access the forum about an hour ago but it seems to be working again now.

[EEVblog]

Are captchas turned completely off right now? 

Unless gnif did something last night I don't know about, no, still on.
AppleBot is still blocked, it's the only change I made last night.

[thm_w]

For some reason the forum works more reliably than the main site, which almost always gives me a 502 error: https://www.eevblog.com/

  Any idea why the sudden surge in 502 errors?  I couldn't access the forum about an hour ago but it seems to be working again now.

5.8 million page views today, almost the peak (8 mil on sept 10) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/stats/

[EEVblog]

Main eevblog.com wordpress website is still down this morning, it might require a database reboot or something

[tautech]

Only for the record, 502's for an hour of so from ~7-8am Sydney time = NZT -2hrs.

  Any idea why the sudden surge in 502 errors?  I couldn't access the forum about an hour ago but it seems to be working again now.

None.

Only the same Cloudfare message as Xena reported a day or 2 back:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/news/getting-a-lot-of-502-bad-gateway-errors/msg6360340/#msg6360340

[KungFuJosh]

502 errors will happen when the main server is trying to block bot traffic instead of letting CF do it.

[EEVblog]

Main eevblog.com wordpress website is still down this morning, it might require a database reboot or something

Turns out there was also a large attack on the Wordpress admin panel on the main website which took it down and Cloudflare failed to stop. Back up now with extra measures in place.
gnif is working on more server side fixes for better integration with Cloudflare.

[factory]

The Bot count is still increasing, currently 277k ATM, forum is almost unusable. 

David

[TimFox]

I am now getting intermittent 502 errors when trying to access individual threads.
(10:40 AM Chicago time)

[EEVblog]

Out of interest I checked out the Electrotech online forum and they also have a large number of guests.
BTW, gnif said the Guest count isn't as simple as it sounds, and is not necessarily a good gauge of how well the forum holds up.
It remains super fast for me this morning.

[EEVblog]

Electronics-lab.com forum

[EEVblog]

All About Circuits
So yeah, all the forums are getting hit with massive Guest ratios, we are just getting hit harder.

[EEVblog]

AI bots that report themselves in the last hour.
The real problem of course is the bad actors that don't report themselves.

[endless∞]

I have a list of 1,855 scraper IPs which I'm auto-blocking on a different production site. They're identifiable due to a unique URI pattern which they all try to use. They probably all go via the same residential proxy service. They do have the capability to bypass a (non-interactive) Cloudflare challenge.

In my case the recent significant uptick in traffic from this group resumed in anger on 17 September at 17:20 UTC.

If an admin is curious & wants to grep eevb logs to see if it could be the same group, let me know who to DM it to. Obv residential IPs change regularly, so it won't be a permanent list. Some are also CGNAT mobile and may include legit users. But maybe it's helpful for a short time, and you can potentially spot request patterns for your blocking efforts.

Note that I've never used eevblog DMs before, and I'm off to sleep now, so if you want it gimme several hours to send.

[xrunner]

Just got this -

Bad gateway Error code 502
Visit cloudflare.com for more information.
2026-09-20 00:13:07 UTC

[EEVblog]

Just was getting 502's again do turned on Under Attack mode in cloud flare and I'm back in instantly. 4pm Sunday Sydney

[EEVblog]

Under Attack mode back off, 8:30pm, let's see if it holds.

[tooki]

AI bots that report themselves in the last hour.
The real problem of course is the bad actors that don't report themselves.

Genuine question out of mere curiosity: do we know if the bots can self-report any user agent they want? I would assume that’s an approach that bad actors would employ, too — if there isn’t some form of authentication or digital signature, that is. Or does Cloudflare (or whatever the source of the screenshot is) use some other method of identifying the bots?

[EEVblog]

Genuine question out of mere curiosity: do we know if the bots can self-report any user agent they want? I would assume that’s an approach that bad actors would employ, too — if there isn’t some form of authentication or digital signature, that is. Or does Cloudflare (or whatever the source of the screenshot is) use some other method of identifying the bots?

I don't know, that's a question for @gnif

[EEVblog]

Looks like the counter-play is to enable Under Attack mode and they vanish for a while.
Might have to continue to play whack-a-mole.

[gnif]

Genuine question out of mere curiosity: do we know if the bots can self-report any user agent they want? I would assume that’s an approach that bad actors would employ, too — if there isn’t some form of authentication or digital signature, that is. Or does Cloudflare (or whatever the source of the screenshot is) use some other method of identifying the bots?

I don't know, that's a question for @gnif

@tooki, yes, the user-agent is a client side string controlled by the connecting application and has no methods of certifying authenticity.

[EEVblog]

Oops, I thought I had switched off Under Attack mode last night, but it was still operational. Off now.
This is the last 24 hours at Cloudflare, UA mode really scared them off.

[EEVblog]

502 again. Enabled Under Attack mode again and as always, I'm instantly back in.
This is getting tiresome.