Learn how to bypass the Cloudflare Waiting Room. Our Cloudflare Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

How to bypass Cloudflare Waiting Room

Have you ever visited a website protected by Cloudflare and found yourself in a brief waiting room before reaching the actual content?

If you have, you might be wondering what that waiting room is all about. Today, we are going to unravel the mystery behind Cloudflare’s waiting room, explore its purpose, and learn how to bypass it with ease.

What is Cloudflare Waiting Room?

When we access a website protected by Cloudflare, our first pitstop is the waiting room. This short delay serves a purpose. It is a security measure that differentiates humans from bots. During this brief wait, our browser handles challenges to prove we are a legitimate user.

If you’re deemed a bot, we will face an “Access Denied” error. However, if we pass the challenges, we will get to proceed to the actual web page.

Furthermore, the waiting room experience lasts only a few seconds. It usually depends on the target site’s security level and how well our browser handles the challenges. In other, words, for highly protected sites, this process might take around five to ten seconds.

The good news is that once you successfully navigate this, we will not run into the waiting room again for a while.

How to Bypass Cloudflare’s Waiting Room?

Our experts offer two different ways to bypass Cloudflare’s waiting room.

• Administrative IP Bypass Rule

  Many site administrators and internal employees of the website may need constant access to a site, regardless of waiting room queues. Fortunately, Cloudflare helps us out with these administrative IP bypass rules.

  Here’s how you can set it up:

  1. Create an IP list for the relevant addresses.
  2. Configure a waiting room from the Waiting Room dashboard.
  3. Manage rules to create an IP-based rule using the rule builder.
  4. Save and deploy the rule.

  Furthermore, we can check the indicators on the Waiting Room dashboard if the bypass rules are enabled.
• Via the Waiting Room API – Path Exclusions

  In some cases, certain customers require exclusions for specific URLs, paths, or query strings from the waiting room. We can accomplish this by creating bypass rules via the Waiting Room API:

  
curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones//waiting_rooms//rules" -H "Authorization: Bearer " -d '{
"description": "ticket holders bypass waiting room",
"expression": "ends_with(http.request.uri.path, \"/userverified\")",
"action": "bypass_waiting_room"
}'


  This call creates a new rule, allowing specific traffic to bypass the waiting room based on defined conditions.

Let us know in the comments if you need further help with bypassing the Cloudflare waiting room.

[Need assistance with a different issue? Our team is available 24/7.]

Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to bypass the Cloudflare Waiting Room.