Error Code 502 Cloudflare: Meaning & How to Fix
A 502 Bad Gateway error indicates that Cloudflare received an invalid response from the origin server. By mimicking organic user behavior, proxy servers and scrapers can help reduce the frequency of this error, but they are not a guaranteed fix.
What causes the Cloudflare error 502?
Some of the most common causes of 502 Bad Gateway error message include the server being down, server overload, firewall blocks, or scraping activity that triggers rate limits. Sending too many requests too quickly – especially without proper headers or delays – can lead Cloudflare to block traffic, resulting in this error.
How proxies can help handle Cloudflare error 502?
Avoid rate limits with rotating proxies
If you’re sending too many requests from a single IP, Cloudflare may flag this activity as suspicious and return a 502 error page. Rotating proxies help by distributing requests across a pool of IP addresses, reducing the load per IP and lowering the chances of triggering rate limits or automated blocks.
Imitate organic user behavior
By using IP addresses from real devices, residential proxies make your scraping traffic look more like that of a genuine user. This helps bypass Cloudflare's bot detection systems, which are often triggered by unnatural request patterns. Learn more about proxy error codes and how to address such cases on our blog.
Focus on quality and reliability
Using low-quality or overused IPs can increase the chances of triggering common error codes like 502. Best proxy providers offer ethically-sourced IPs, smart rotation, and geographic flexibility, all of which can help maintain stable connections and reduce the likelihood of Cloudflare blocking your traffic.
Web scraping API to avoid 502 error
Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API is specifically designed to handle most common error codes like Cloudflare 502 by managing proxy rotation, retries, headers, and everything else for you. Forget about interruptions and extract large volumes of public data from even the most complex targets hassle-free.
Proxy management
Let ML-driven infrastructure handle proxies from a pool of 195 geo-locations for specific targets.
Custom parameters
Customize API behavior for your specific needs with custom headers and cookies.
AI-powered fingerprinting
Outsmart anti-scraping technologies with AI-picked IPs, headers, cookies, and WebRTC properties.
Automatic retries
Improve and simplify your processes with automatic retries of failed requests with different scraping parameters.
Headless Browser
Render JavaScript-reliant pages with a single code line and perform browser actions like clicking, scrolling, and more.
Custom Parser
Define custom parsing instructions and retrieve parsed data in JSON format.
Web Crawler
Crawl any site from top to bottom, select useful data, and fetch it in bulk.
Scheduler
Have your scraping projects run at any schedule, automatically deliver scraped data, and get notifications.