Wordfence Blocking WP Cron (learning mode doesn’t help)

  • Resolved wprob7

    (@wprob7)


    3 years, 5 months ago

    Hi, Wordfence is blocking the Wp Cron. I’ve reviewed other threads and tried to put the site in learning mode so the cron can be whitelisted but that does not work. This is the error I get from wp crontrol

    “There was a problem spawning a call to the WP-Cron system on your site. This means WP-Cron events on your site may not work. The problem was:

    Unexpected HTTP response code: 503”

    Any ideas on how to fix it? Should I whitelist our servers IP or is that a bad idea? Thanks for your help!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @wprob7, thanks for getting in touch over this.

    Since wp-cron.php is accessed with a web request, a block is possible although not a common issue, and some platforms such as Cloudflare and Litespeed require extra configuration.

    Cloudflare for example has sometimes required customers to add Wordfence IPs and their own site’s IP to the Cloudflare firewall whitelist to prevent certain issues.

    If that doesn’t help point you in the right direction, feel free to send over a diagnostic report to wftest @ wordfence . com. You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

    NOTE: It should look as follows – Screenshot of Tools > Diagnostic > Send by Email

    Thanks,

    Peter.

    Thread Starter wprob7

    (@wprob7)

    Thanks, I’ve sent the report. We are not using cloudflare or other CDN.

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @wprob7, thanks for providing your diagnostics.

    The error being returned when our servers attempt to connect to your site is a Wordfence blocking page (503 error) so looks like our servers are being blocked, which is not a normal result of this check.

    Take a look whether any of our IP addresses appear in Wordfence > Firewall > Blocking. You can check our addresses here: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/#servers-and-ip-range

    You can manually unblock the IP(s) from here to allow them access to the site again.

    I would repeat the same procedure to see if your site is blocking its own IP, which can be discovered in Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics > IP(s) used by this server. That could be the source of the other issues with cron jobs etc.

    If the Wordfence IPs don’t appear in any block list, you could try adding them to “Allowlisted IP addresses that bypass all rules” found in the Wordfence > All Options > Advanced Firewall Options section to see whether that remedies.

    Do not add your own site’s IP to the allowlisted IP list if it’s on a shared hosting server because if another compromised site on the same server attacks your site then the attacks will bypass all Wordfence protection.

    Thanks,

    Peter.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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