Service Unavailable

I’ve just installed Wordfence. while installing the software it picked up Bulletproof Security, I told Wordfence to bypass the files found.. now everything seemed ok, just tried clicking my website url and received this message:

Service Unavailable

Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503)
This response was generated by Wordfence.

Ive asked other people to connect to website, and they don’t seem to have a problem connecting, looks like I’m the only one blocked??

Any thoughts on what’s going on??

Am I temporarily locked out due to exceeding the number of connects?

Are you still locked out?

No can access now thanks ;)

Great. Apologies for the inconvenience. Looks like some blogs get a lot of requests from their own admin’s IP address in an unauthenticated way, so we’re looking at that and ways to remotely unlock IP addresses while maintaining security.

Let me know if we can help further.

Mark.

Hi i have the exact issue with my site.. please help me out as you helped supremo. and let me know what should I do to avoid this issue in future. Thanks
* I also installed wordefence and now neither admin page nor site is appearing. Please help me out.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by  Shahzad Bashir.

Shahzad,

Are you seeing the page that says your access has been limited? If so you should see an option to enter your admin email address and get instructions to unlock access. This was added recently, so make sure you’re running the newest version of Wordfence.

Mark.

Hello. I’m having the same problem on my site. The message ‘Service Unavailable – Your access to this site has been temporarily limited’ comes up and I haven’t been able to find a way around it. When I enter my email and click ‘send me an unlock email’ nothing happens.

Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you,
Gonzalo.

Please make sure you enter the email you used to create your admin account. Also check your spam folder.

If you’re still having problems, email me at mark@wordfence.com and I’ll try to help.

Mark.

I just had a client run into this error, she did a search on google and found a link going to my site, she clicked the link on google and received this error. I’ve been unable to replicate this, but she tried it twice and both times received the error. She’s not an admin and has never been to the site before. This was just to a normal page

Thanks Richard. I’m beginning to think we’re seeing this when people have a web browser that is pretending to be Google by using Google’s user agent string. Wordfence blocks fake googlebots by default. If this is a common problem I’m going to disable this feature by default. Let me know if you think this was the case.

Mark.

For what it’s worth I also started getting this – spouse at home noticed it first and, lo, I saw it at work. Both with Firefox. Disabled WF for now, but if there’s debugging info I can get for you, please key me know. Jim

By the way, I appreciate the forethought of option three on the email. :-)

Hi Jim,

Let me know what version of Wordfence you’re running.

We disable the firewall by default when our customers install Wordfence now. We think the problem is that many customers have browsers that pretend to be google’s crawlers (googlebot) and get blocked by the “block fake googlebots” rule that we had enabled by default. This is now disabled unless a customer specifically enables it.

So I’d recommend upgrading to the latest version if you haven’t already. Then go to the Wordfence Options menu. Check the box to disable the firewall (or at the very least disable the option to block fake googlebots). And save. And you should be all set.

Mark.

Just an update. Wordfence is no longer shipped with the firewall enabled by default. We think the specific cause of this issue (people being blocked immediately) may be that Wordfence firewall was configured to block people pretending to be googlebot by default. We think that many developers configure the user-agent of their browser to be Googlebot for testing so this may have caused them to be blocked.

Needless to say we’ve disabled blocking fake Googlebot’s for all security levels up to level 4. And the firewall is disabled by default. You can enable it if you specifically need it for rate limiting (for example).

Mark.