Many websites use Cloudflare to “offload” their servers, since it’s the largest content delivery network (CDN) in the world. At the same time, Cloudflare can handle website protection against DDoS attacks and act as an intermediary. In this mode, the service works like a filter: it carefully analyzes incoming traffic, detects and blocks suspicious connections. This is what’s known as a WAF (Web Application Firewall).
This article focuses on the Cloudflare error with code 1010. We’ll explain what it means, when it appears, and how to avoid or bypass it when scraping.
What Is Cloudflare Error 1010?
Important! Cloudflare 1010 Error is returned not by the target website you’re trying to scrape, but by the intermediary service — Cloudflare. This means it is acting as a firewall and blocking suspicious connections.
The Cloudflare error with code 1010 (Access Denied, Bad IP) is an access error caused by an incorrect or unsuitable IP address.
Most likely, this error occurs because the IP address you used to connect to the site (either your own or that of a proxy server) has previously been flagged for suspicious activity and has failed the security check.
Why Cloudflare 1010 Happens: Main Causes
The concept of security can be very broad, so below we’ll look at the causes of Cloudflare error 1010 from several angles.
Without going too deep into the details, in most cases Cloudflare 1010 is shown to visitors because one of the following protection rules is triggered:
- The IP violates an access policy. For example, when the site owner has manually blocked certain IP ranges (from specific countries, cities, or subnets).
- There are issues related to the ASN (Autonomous System Number). This mechanism works much like an access policy, but it blocks specific connectivity providers, including hosting companies and corporate networks, or particular subnets (with specific ASNs).
- Problems with encryption during an HTTPS connection. For example, incompatible versions of SSL/TLS certificates and protocols (most often due to outdated browsers or operating systems).
- Overly strict bot protection settings (Bot Fight Mode) and/or suspicion of automation. This situation is typical when scraping, as well as when connecting through proxies or a VPN.
These rules can be configured and triggered by:
- Site owners who protect their traffic with Cloudflare.
- Cloudflare’s shared infrastructure, when DDoS attacks or other activity that could harm the CDN network are detected.
- The network protocol level, in particular, SSL/TLS encryption during HTTPS connections.
Cloudflare Error 1010 From a Visitor’s Perspective
What symptoms indicate that a Cloudflare 1010 error has occurred? It’s quite simple. In most cases, you’ll recognize it by a special placeholder page.
The browser will display something like:
To fix error code 1010, a regular user can go through the following steps and try to eliminate potential issues:
- Disable your VPN client or proxy. Keep in mind that a proxy/VPN can be running system-wide (for the entire OS) or only inside a specific app, such as your browser.
- Make sure you’re using an up-to-date browser version. Ideally, use one of the mainstream options like Edge, Chrome, Safari, etc. If possible, try accessing the site from different browsers to confirm the problem isn’t specific to just one application.
- If only a particular browser is “acting up,” check whether JavaScript processing is disabled in it.
If that doesn’t help, turn off all browser extensions and try accessing the site with a “clean” profile.
Clear the cookies for the website where you’re getting the Cloudflare 1010 error.
If the error appears only on a specific device, check whether that device’s TLS/SSL certificates are up to date (they may be outdated, especially if you’re using an operating system version that hasn’t been updated for a long time), or scan your drive for viruses/unwanted software (it may be sending automated requests to the target site, which Cloudflare detects and responds to with error code 1010).
Check your system time settings, and even better, enable automatic time synchronization using network time servers.
Try disabling your antivirus software, firewalls, and ad blockers. In some cases, they can modify HTTP requests and break their integrity (especially when they “cut out” ads and trackers).
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Cloudflare Error 1010 When Scraping or Automating
Keep in mind that Cloudflare’s job when filtering unwanted traffic for a website is precisely to efficiently weed out all the “junk” connections generated by bots and scrapers. They don’t bring any real value to the site and sometimes are outright harmful.
Therefore, if you encounter Cloudflare 1010 error while scraping, it means your scraper is not good enough yet to bypass Cloudflare’s protection rules. Or the problem lies in the type/quality of your proxies.
Typical reasons that lead to this error include:
- Ignoring the quality (believability) of your digital fingerprints.
- Requests sent too frequently or at perfectly regular intervals.
- Lack of JavaScript support and ignoring cookies.
- Distinct technical fingerprints typical of popular headless browsers.
- Attempts to access private/protected API endpoints.
- Poor-quality proxies or IP addresses with a bad reputation. For example, those belonging to hosting providers, blacklisted for spam, used in VPN networks, etc.
Fixing Cloudflare 1010 for Scrapers and API Clients
It’s not that some specific programming construct directly causes error code 1010. This is not a bug in your code or script. It’s a problem with the scraper’s overall logic and behavior: the script is being detected and blocked. It would be naïve to expect Cloudflare’s developers to publish a straightforward checklist on how to prevent or bypass Cloudflare error 1010.
So, first of all, your scraper must be able to handle Cloudflare 1010 errors so it can promptly detect them and either stop or trigger special bypass / fallback algorithms.
Second, you need to go through the possible causes of Cloudflare error 1010 and carefully rethink your scraper’s logic. Sometimes it’s enough to fix a single issue, but in other cases you may have to rewrite the entire scraper from scratch because it’s conceptually outdated and easily detected by Cloudflare’s anti-bot protection. Based on the most likely causes outlined above, we can offer the following recommendations for quick response.
Prevention Tips: Keeping Code 1010 Away
- Using anti-detect browsers or emulating natural browser profiles in combination with headless browsers.
- Randomizing delays between requests so they look as much as possible like typical human behavior. It’s important to remember that no human can send 100 requests in a single second. If your scraping is large-scale, the way out is to parallelize requests or rapidly rotate browser profiles together with proxy servers.
- Enabling JavaScript support is a must (for this you’ll need those same headless browsers or anti-detect solutions) and you also have to work correctly with cookies (not only at the whole-browser level, but also at the fingerprint level — if you connect from different locations but with the same browser profile, you’ll be detected quickly).
- Learn how to hide the typical signatures of popular headless browsers. You can use special modules and libraries for this (more experienced developers can manually adjust the default settings of headless browsers).
- Try to interact with the site the way a real person would. That is, without directly calling internal API endpoints, and without jumping to protected forms, hidden links, and so on.
- Use high-quality proxies that closely match the device types of real users. For example, mobile proxies (as the most trusted) or residential proxies. It’s also worth implementing proper proxy rotation. For instance, if you’re working with pages that don’t require authentication, the best strategy is to change the IP for each new request or on a short timer. But if you log in and pass Cloudflare’s checks, it makes sense to switch to “sticky” sessions and keep the exit IP paired with a believable fingerprint for as long as possible.
The exact technical setup can vary from project to project. Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe.
Script Example to Detect Cloudflare Error 1010
We love Python, so our sample scripts are written in it:
import random
import time
import requests
import telegram
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
import undetected_chromedriver as uc
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
# -------------------------------
# CONFIG
# -------------------------------
TARGET_URLS = [
"https://example.com/page1",
"https://example.com/page2"
]
BACKCONNECT_PROXIES = [
"proxy1.example.com:1234",
"proxy2.example.com:1234",
"proxy3.example.com:1234"
]
BROWSER_PROFILES = [
{"user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/121.0", "cookies": "cookies/profile1.txt"},
{"user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 ... Firefox/119.0", "cookies": "cookies/profile2.txt"},
{"user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 ... Safari/605.1.15", "cookies": "cookies/profile3.txt"}
]
REQUEST_TIMEOUT = 20
RETRY_LIMIT = 3
TG_TOKEN = "YOUR_TELEGRAM_TOKEN"
TG_CHAT_ID = "YOUR_CHAT_ID"
bot = telegram.Bot(TG_TOKEN)
# -------------------------------
# UTILITIES
# -------------------------------
def send_telegram_message(text):
bot.send_message(chat_id=TG_CHAT_ID, text=text)
def get_random_proxy():
return random.choice(BACKCONNECT_PROXIES)
def random_delay():
time.sleep(random.uniform(3, 5))
def is_cloudflare_1010(response):
if response.status_code == 403 and "1010" in response.text:
return True
return False
# -------------------------------
# HEADLESS SELENIUM LOADER
# -------------------------------
def load_with_selenium(url, profile):
proxy = get_random_proxy()
options = uc.ChromeOptions()
options.headless = False # remains visible, but the window can be hidden
options.add_argument(f"--proxy-server=http://{proxy}")
options.add_argument(f"--user-agent={profile['user_agent']}")
driver = uc.Chrome(options=options)
# cookies download (if any)
try:
with open(profile["cookies"], "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
cookies = f.read().split("\n")
for c in cookies:
if "=" in c:
name, value = c.split("=", 1)
driver.add_cookie({"name": name.strip(), "value": value.strip()})
except:
pass
driver.get(url)
time.sleep(3)
# Action imitation
actions = ActionChains(driver)
# mouse move
for _ in range(3):
actions.move_by_offset(
random.randint(-50, 50),
random.randint(-50, 50)
).perform()
time.sleep(0.3)
# scroll
for _ in range(3):
driver.execute_script("window.scrollBy(0, arguments[0]);", random.randint(200, 700))
time.sleep(0.5)
html = driver.page_source
driver.quit()
return html
# -------------------------------
# REQUESTS LOADER
# -------------------------------
def load_with_requests(url, profile):
proxy = get_random_proxy()
proxies = {
"http": f"http://{proxy}",
"https": f"http://{proxy}"
}
headers = {
"User-Agent": profile["user_agent"],
"Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9"
}
# cookies download
cookies_dict = {}
try:
with open(profile["cookies"], "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
for line in f:
if "=" in line:
k, v = line.split("=", 1)
cookies_dict[k.strip()] = v.strip()
except:
pass
response = requests.get(
url,
headers=headers,
cookies=cookies_dict,
proxies=proxies,
timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT
)
return response
# -------------------------------
# MAIN PARSE FUNCTION
# -------------------------------
def process_url(url):
print(f"Processing: {url}")
attempts = 0
while attempts < RETRY_LIMIT:
attempts += 1
profile = random.choice(BROWSER_PROFILES)
random_delay()
try:
response = load_with_requests(url, profile)
if is_cloudflare_1010(response):
print("Cloudflare 1010 detected. Switching to Selenium...")
html = load_with_selenium(url, profile)
return html
if response.status_code == 200:
return response.text
else:
print(f"Error {response.status_code}, attempt {attempts}")
except Exception as e:
print(f"Request error: {e}, attempt {attempts}")
# if everything is bad — send to Telegram
send_telegram_message(f" Error when processing URL after {RETRY_LIMIT} attempts:\n{url}")
return None
# -------------------------------
# ENTRY POINT
# -------------------------------
if __name__ == "__main__":
for url in TARGET_URLS:
html = process_url(url)
if html:
print(f"Loaded: {len(html)} bytes")
else:
print("Failed.")Don’t forget to install the required libraries and wait for the headless browsers for Selenium to finish loading.
What the script does:
- Takes a list of URLs as input. You can replace the initial array with your own.
- For each URL, it selects a random proxy (we assume a backconnect setup, so in theory a single IP:port is enough, since IP rotation is handled by the proxy service itself. But you can also list different proxy ports here, e.g., from different locations or with different session/rotation logic).
- Chooses a random browser profile (analogous to rotating browser fingerprints).
- First tries to load the page via the HTTP requests library.
- If the page returns Cloudflare error 1010, the scraper switches over to undetected-chromedriver (a ready-made library for masking headless browser usage).
- In headless mode it simulates mouse movement, performs random scrolling, and uses random delays everywhere.
- If the error is something other than 1010, it will try to “reach the page” N times, and when all attempts are exhausted, it sends a problem notification to Telegram.
The script itself doesn’t contain any specific parsing logic, but you can add it on your own or borrow from our examples in related blog posts. For HTML parsing we recommend using BeautifulSoup.
FAQ About Cloudflare 1010
Why am I getting Cloudflare error messages?
Cloudflare-related issues don’t come from the target website (the one you’re trying to scrape), but from Cloudflare’s own protection mechanisms. This service acts as a kind of web antivirus (or advanced firewall) and can analyze a large number of connection attributes: browser fingerprints, IP history, user behavior and more. Getting past Cloudflare’s defenses can be quite difficult, and the service is not limited to error code 1010, you may encounter many other access errors. The most annoying format is being forced to solve a CAPTCHA. We have a separate article on how to deal with Cloudflare protection. If you see an error, it means you’ve failed Cloudflare’s automatic security check. For regular users who aren’t involved in web scraping, it’s usually enough to disable their VPN or proxy — in most cases, Cloudflare error 1010 is triggered by them. But there may be other reasons as well, all of which we’ve covered above.
Does changing my IP address help with Cloudflare 1010?
Not always. If Cloudflare’s security system is unhappy with your browser profile (digital fingerprint), changing the IP won’t help. Although yes, the root cause is often the low quality of the IP address. Another case where IP rotation won’t save you is when the IP belongs to an ASN subnet or to an IP pool of a specific provider that has been flagged as undesirable. In that situation, rotating IPs within the same subnet will keep leading to Cloudflare error 1010.
Is error code 1010 related to CAPTCHA?
Indirectly. If Cloudflare considers a client suspicious, it may either show a CAPTCHA or immediately return code 1010. However, the error itself means an access denial at the rules level, not a mandatory CAPTCHA challenge.
Can Cloudflare error code 1010 be temporary?
Yes. Sometimes Cloudflare’s cloud-based protection rules change dynamically: there may be A/B tests, temporary geoblocking, occasional traffic filters, or an increase in the “suspicion” score after several rapid requests. After some time, access may be restored.
What’s the difference between Cloudflare error 1010, 1020, and 1006?
- 1010: access denied based on the current IP or request parameters.
- 1020: a specific firewall rule set by the site owner has been violated.
- 1006: you’ve been blocked manually or your access has been restricted geographically.
Conclusion and Recommendations
So, even though the error code 1010 and its general cause are clearly defined, 1010 can be triggered by a combination of many factors — from a genuinely bad IP address to “suspicious” user activity (when signs of automation and scraping are detected from that IP).
You can’t always get rid of the error just by quickly changing (rotating) your IP address. However, the quality and “naturalness” of the IP are at the core of any further attempts to bypass the issue.
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