CF-Incidents Cloudflare Fundamentals - Retry-After HTTP header for retryable 1xxx errors

[ENF News Bot]

Cloudflare-generated 1xxx error responses now include a standard Retry-After HTTP header when the error is retryable. Agents and HTTP clients can read the recommended wait time from response headers alone — no body parsing required.

Changes​

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/rss/#changes

Seven retryable error codes now emit Retry-After:

Error code	Retry-After (seconds)	Error name
1004	120	DNS resolution error
1005	120	Banned zone
1015	30	Rate limited
1033	120	Argo Tunnel error
1038	60	HTTP headers limit exceeded
1200	60	Cache connection limit
1205	5	Too many redirects

The header value matches the existing retry_after body field in JSON and Markdown responses.

If a WAF rate limiting rule has already set a dynamic Retry-After value on the response, that value takes precedence.

Availability​

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/rss/#availability

Available for all zones on all plans.

Verify​

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/rss/#verify

Check for the header on any retryable error:


curl -s --compressed -D - -o /dev/null -H "Accept: application/json" -A "TestAgent/1.0" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" "<YOUR_DOMAIN>/cdn-cgi/error/1015" | grep -i retry-after

References:

• RFC 9110 section 10.2.3 - Retry-After ↗︎
• Cloudflare 1xxx error documentation

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