Wordfence making site go down. Not just my IP but everyone.

ZC Web
(@zc-web)

2 years, 3 months ago

I have sites on my server. I am at Siteground. Most of the sites are fine. But there are a few which the site is going down from time to time. It says for the reason: Blocked by login security setting. It is because of Wordfence. I have rate limiting for logging in but it is blocking everyone in the whole world for a rate limiting setting. How is that possible? Why would it shut my site down and make me unlock via email? I want Wordfence to block hackers not the general public ever under any circumstance. I get in the email: ‘Either you or someone else at IP address { my ip address } requested instructions to regain access to the website’. I click on ‘Click here to unlock your ability to sign-in and to access to the site’ via the email. I’ve seen this on clients computer who have never accessed the site. This is a general public being locked out.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

WFGerroald
(@wfgerald)

2 years, 3 months ago

Hey @zc-web,

Can you please check your setting in How does Wordfence get IPs to make sure it’s correctly identifying your IP?

https://www.wordfence.com/help/dashboard/options/#general-wordfence-options

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Gerroald
shihtzurescue
(@shihtzurescue)

2 years, 3 months ago
With SiteGround too and having a similar issue. I don’t see the reason “blocked by security login” though. Problems did go away upon disabling wordfence but this is not a real option long-term for us.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by shihtzurescue.
Thread Starter ZC Web
(@zc-web)

2 years, 3 months ago

It isn’t tied to my IP. I was at a new clients home and was going to show a website on their computer and it was blocked. It seems the public regardless of IP are locked out from the website. Also I have Uptime monitor on the site and I get frequent emails saying the site is down… then after 30 minutes or so it goes up. I am including my exported settings here if you want to look at them.

1510ee403579a134a7751fb2010a8df9ab07f8e56445bbea926f6a31ba134ec3df573a0849cca2e9746859c681684d013fe465755498e317bb231be3916c587c

Also during a recent scan I saw this:

Unable to accurately detect IPs
Type: IP Detection

Not sure if that has anything to do with it. If this is another issue we can attack that later. I’d like to solve this issue with taking down my site.

If everyone has a different IP address why would it take down the website for random people who have never visited and are not blacklisted. This has also been observed on my phone.

Thread Starter ZC Web
(@zc-web)

2 years, 3 months ago

As we speak…

The monitor { the website } is currently DOWN (HTTP 503 – Service Unavailable).

Event timestamp: 2020-03-05 13:36:58 UTC+0

Uptime Robot will alert you when it is back up.

Thread Starter ZC Web
(@zc-web)

2 years, 3 months ago

And if this helps you further diagnose. I was logged in to the admin and still got locked out. It’s like my site gets completely shut down by the plugin for everybody? So I have to send the unlock email then it works again. Or sometimes I wait for it to come back up.