It’s difficult and extremely expensive for website owners to maintain their own security system, and they also need a convenient way to speed up content delivery to users in remote regions. That’s exactly where services like Cloudflare come in. It’s both a content delivery network (CDN) and a web application firewall (WAF) with adaptive protection technologies.
But what if you’re scraping a specific site and suddenly run into Error 1005? That means you’ve been banned by Cloudflare, which is responsible for protecting that resource.
In this article, we explain how to access a blocked site when you encounter Error 1005.
In most cases, access-denied errors happen because a scraper breaks the most basic “good behavior” rules. A simple set of core scraping principles looks like this:
But what should you do if your scraper gets detected and blocked? Let’s focus on an ethical way to handle Cloudflare Error 1005.
Error 1005 is most commonly associated with a Cloudflare ban and typically means “access denied.” It’s often accompanied by the message “Access denied.” Different situations can trigger this error. Below, we’ll go through each one separately.
The most common and officially documented reason is an ASN-level block, where Cloudflare restricts access to a specific page or even an entire site for a whole autonomous network (ASN). In practice, that network can be the IP range of your ISP or your hosting provider, for example.
Error 1005 strongly suggests that Cloudflare has flagged the entire network as a source of abusive traffic. The ASN may be associated with malware-infected devices, bot activity, and similar issues. However, this kind of block can also affect proxy networks, VPN services, data centers, and corporate networks.
The main reason behind such restrictions is a high level of abuse: spam, bots, DDoS attacks, and related activity.
Sometimes the restriction is not imposed by Cloudflare itself, but by the site owner. They can configure custom blocking rules; for example, deny access to specific networks (ASNs), certain ISPs, or even entire regions such as cities, countries, or states/provinces.
Common reasons include licensing limitations (especially relevant for streaming platforms, online cinemas, and online games), sanctions and regional laws, or simply a business decision not to serve traffic from a particular location.
Many sites intentionally block popular VPN providers or static proxy operators by ASN or IP ranges. If you access a site through a commercial VPN, a data-center proxy, or a static residential proxy with a “bad” reputation, the site may return Error 1005.
With large-scale automated data collection, similar requests may come not from a single IP address but from an entire subnet; for example, if the scraper developer rotates addresses within one specific location and ISP. To Cloudflare, this can look like a botnet, and all traffic from that network may be treated as abusive.
Error 1005 is especially common during web scraping even when you’re not explicitly breaking rules, Cloudflare’s heuristic detection can still trigger it.
What’s notable is that it may happen even if you personally did nothing wrong. For instance, you might be visiting a site for the first time and still get Error 1005. In that case, other users from the same network likely violated the rules earlier. This often happens with smaller ISPs or mobile carrier networks.
What to do with Cloudflare Error 1010?
If your scraper is configured poorly, for example, you don’t set a realistic User-Agent, you hit the site too frequently, or your fingerprint parameters look unnatural and especially if you ignore site rules and directives from robots.txt, Cloudflare’s firewall can block you as well.
How to ethically bypass a WAF when scraping?
In some network services and apps, such as Google IMA SDK for ads or Apple Family Sharing an error with code 1005 can mean different things, for example:
But in 95%+ of web cases, Error 1005 refers specifically to Cloudflare + an ASN ban. Keep in mind that many online services and games also use Cloudflare protection, so their “1005” often points to the same underlying issue, just without explicitly telling the user it’s a ban.
If you weren’t scraping anything, contact your internet provider. They may not even be aware that their IP ranges have been blocked. If protection lists are outdated or misconfigured, the ISP can work on resolving the issue on their side by reaching out to Cloudflare. Still, don’t expect the ban to be lifted quickly, this can take a long time.
If you need access urgently, try connecting to the site through a VPN or proxy, ideally from different locations, so you don’t end up in another ASN that’s also on the blocked list.
Below, we’ll focus only on scraping-related options, how to access a blocked site when you run into Error 1005.
If, for scraping, you selected a specific location (a city), a particular carrier/ISP, or even networks with certain ASN numbers, try different connection parameters: choose another city, region, or internet service provider.
If your proxy provider has a small proxy pool, it’s entirely possible that all of their servers have already been blocked. In that case, you’ll need to switch to a higher-quality provider.
For example, Froxy offers rotation across 10+ million IP addresses from residential and mobile users. Blocking such a massive number of ASN networks is simply unrealistic.
If changing your proxy provider doesn’t help or your scraper still gets blocked after a while, move on to the next points.
Classic scrapers built on simple HTTP-request libraries are often detected because they don’t support JavaScript. To execute and render JS, you need a dedicated engine and that’s only available inside full-featured browsers.
Most protection systems, including Cloudflare, think about traffic roughly like this: real visitors access the target site either via an up-to-date mainstream browser (which naturally supports JavaScript) or via an official mobile app (apps are signed with special certificates). Cloudflare runs a preliminary JS challenge and checks whether the user’s browser environment looks “natural.” If the check fails, the IP can be blocked.
Emulating a genuine mobile app is quite difficult, but emulating a browser is much more realistic. You can do that by integrating with a real browser via web-driver libraries or by running dedicated headless browser instances. Common solutions include Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright, chromedp, and others. They work across different platforms and programming languages. Some can also be deployed on a server and exposed via an API, so any script or program can control them remotely.
As a result:
Cloudflare’s protection algorithms are constantly improving. They’ve also learned to reliably identify traffic coming from headless browsers based on a range of technical signals and headers.
There are different approaches discussed online for dealing with Cloudflare-protected sites. But in general, the key ideas are usually described as:
With sufficiently realistic signals, distinguishing a real user from an automated client becomes significantly harder.
To understand how the target site and its protection systems “see” a client browser, tools like Wireshark (an open-source network protocol analyzer) can be useful. If Cloudflare’s WAF reliably flags your automated client but does not block a real user’s browser, you can compare network requests to identify differences in what is being sent and received.
Instead of building your own scraper from scratch and dealing with its issues, you can outsource the task via an API or through a dedicated service dashboard/personal account. For example, Froxy Scraper is a no-code solution for collecting structured data from dozens of popular platforms: search engines (Google SERP, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), e-commerce sites, online maps, social networks, and more. If there isn’t a ready-made integration for your target, you can use a universal HTML scraper, it saves the full rendered page code and also extracts common attributes.
Once the data is collected and ready to be delivered to the client, Froxy Scraper can send a notification via a webhook. This means the download and parsing workflow can be automated end-to-end.
More details are available in the documentation.
You don’t need to worry about proxies here; their usage and configuration are already included in the cloud scraper.
To reduce the risk of encountering Error 1005 already at the scraper design stage, it’s important to consider the following:
More details can be found in the article “Scrape Like a Pro.”
Error 1005 typically appears when a website is protected by Cloudflare. In this context, the code generally indicates that Cloudflare’s web application firewall (WAF) has restricted access not only for a single IP address, but for a broader network range (an ASN). This may happen for a variety of reasons.
From a responsible and compliant perspective, the correct response is to review and adjust the data-collection approach: verify that access is permitted, reduce request intensity, prefer official APIs or licensed data sources where available, and coordinate with the site owner or network provider if access is mistakenly blocked.
A key practical consideration in legitimate integrations is the reliability and reputation of the network environment used for accessing online services: low-quality or widely abused shared endpoints are more likely to face restrictions, while stable, well-maintained connectivity reduces the risk of false positives and unnecessary blocks.