If you are having trouble sharing your posts to Facebook, you have 2 choices for fixing it.
You can wait out a potential temporary glitch or you can whitelist Facebook’s range of IPs in Cloudflare.
Discover what’s happening and steps to remedy the situation.
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See the livestream at the end of this post with more info on this issue
What’s Happening
By default, Cloudflare does not block requests from Facebook.
But there has been a sudden outbreak of them in the last month.
We don’t know if this is a temporary glitch or a permanent change by Facebook as they continue to rollout new features and/or stern requirements.
This Glitch is Known
Over the past few years, there have been intermittent issue with Cloudflare blocking shares of your blog posts to Facebook for a few years. It’s mostly been due to I’m Under Attack settings that heavily scrutinize traffic to and from your site. Or, it was due a Page Rule setup by the end user. Or, on occasion, it has been from Cloudflare scanning from a country that is either being heavily scrutinized by Cloudflare at the time, or one that has been set to Challenge by the user.
But those cases have been rare and seldom.
It does not explain the sudden outbreak we are experiencing.
Solution 1
This may be a temporary glitch at Facebook. There is simply no way to verify that or guess at when it will be resolved, if ever.
So, you can wait it out and see if it resolves itself. It seems to have for some folks.
Solution 2
If you can’t wait, or don’t want to wait, you can whitelist Facebook’s entire IP range in Cloudflare’s Firewall settings.
Cloudflare has assured me that this will not punch a hole in your security. You’re welcome to take their word for it, if you like.
Because the Facebook IP range is so vast, they provide an ASN (Autonomous system) to provide that range.
In other words, this ASN takes the place of perhaps 100s of IPs, making it easier to deal with.
There are two ASNs for Facebook:
- AS32934
- AS63293
To whitelist them with Cloudflare:
- Go to Firewall > Tools
- Enter the ASN in the IP field
- Select Whitelist from the drop-down
- Add a note that this is Facebook
- Click the Add button
- Repeat for the second ASN
Use Facebook Debugger to Re-Scrape
If you had previously shared a URL on Facebook and it gave you an error, or was missing an image, you will want to run that URL through the Facebook debugger app to have it rescanned.
It may take running it through the debugger 3-4 times to fix.
More Info
There are several references in the Cloudflare support forum to this issue.
Here is the latest thread as of 5/24/19.
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