from Hacker News

Ask HN: Google Load Balancer / Cloudflare Issues

by stephenheron on 7/5/23, 11:25 PM with 1 comments

Hi HN,

I am a bit of a loss so I am coming to Hacker News in the hopes someone has seen anything like this.

Approximately 6 hours ago we started getting a very strange error back from our site, that appears intermittently:

"<html><title>Error 500 (Internal Server Error)!</title></html>"

This error is a little bit strange, with only an HTML title and no body and a '!' being used. From a Google we can find no other references to this error, I did a search on Twitter and found 1 other reference to it, which is from a users complaining they can't get access to "https://beta.character.ai/". We verified that they are also seeing the same issue. The interesting this is that our site, also has the word beta in it which seems a bit suspicious.

We are running our site behind Cloudflare which is pointing to a Google Cloud Load balancer, from investigating the headers on "https://beta.character.ai/" we can see they are running a similar setup.

We have struggled to 100% identify if the issue is sitting with Cloudflare or Google but my current suspicion is Google.

If anyone has seen anything like this before, or can provide any assistance I would be very grateful.

Thanks, Stephen

  • by plasma on 7/6/23, 12:35 AM

    I’ve had to triage Cloudflare connectivity issues before, if you have a timestamp or when the error appears you can ask CF support to check backend logs for the error reason