CF-Incidents Workers - WebSockets now automatically reply to Close frames

[ENF News Bot]

The Workers runtime now automatically sends a reciprocal Close frame when it receives a Close frame from the peer. The readyState transitions to CLOSED before the close event fires. This matches the WebSocket specification ↗︎ and standard browser behavior.

This change is enabled by default for Workers using compatibility dates on or after 2026-04-07 (via the web_socket_auto_reply_to_close compatibility flag). Existing code that manually calls close() inside the close event handler will continue to work — the call is silently ignored when the WebSocket is already closed.

const [client, server] = Object.values(new WebSocketPair());
server.accept();

server.addEventListener("close", (event) => {
	// readyState is already CLOSED — no need to call server.close().
	console.log(server.readyState); // WebSocket.CLOSED
	console.log(event.code); // 1000
	console.log(event.wasClean); // true
});

Half-open mode for WebSocket proxying​

https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/rss/#half-open-mode-for-websocket-proxying

The automatic close behavior can interfere with WebSocket proxying, where a Worker sits between a client and a backend and needs to coordinate the close on both sides independently. To support this use case, pass { allowHalfOpen: true } to accept():

const [client, server] = Object.values(new WebSocketPair());

server.accept({ allowHalfOpen: true });

server.addEventListener("close", (event) => {
	// readyState is still CLOSING here, giving you time
	// to coordinate the close on the other side.
	console.log(server.readyState); // WebSocket.CLOSING

	// Manually close when ready.
	server.close(event.code, "done");
});

For more information, refer to WebSockets Close behavior.

Continue reading...