{
  "id": 10037011,
  "title": "Cloudflare cached our 404s: why a new page kept 404ing after a good deploy",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/26/cloudflare-cached-our-404s-why-a-new-page-kept-404ing-after-a-good",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-26T18:02:43.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/escrozon/cloudflare-cached-our-404s-why-a-new-page-kept-404ing-after-a-good-deploy-4502"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Escrozon, a digital assets escrow marketplace, encountered an issue after deploying a new landing page. Despite the deploy going smoothly and the server returning the page to visitors, they continued to receive 404 errors for about an hour. The problem stemmed from Cloudflare caching the 404 response. Before the deploy, Escrozon had checked that the new URL was not yet live, receiving a 404 response. The Cloudflare cache rule stored HTML for one hour, including this 404 page. After the deploy, Cloudflare continued to serve its stored 404 until it expired. Depending on the region, visitors might see the page while others still get the 404 due to each Cloudflare data center maintaining its own copy. To determine if a cached 404 was stale or if there was a broken deploy, one could examine response headers. A 404 with \"cf-cache-status: HIT\" means the response came from Cloudflare's cache. Adding a query string to the URL bypasses the cached copy, resulting in a 200 response. To resolve the issue, Escrozon had three options: purge the specific URL, purge everything from the cache, or purge through the API via a deploy script. They also advised against requesting public URLs for non-deployed pages, setting a short cache time for 404s, and purging URLs during the deploy. Additionally, they suggested setting the Browser Cache TTL to respect existing headers and measuring cache performance using a cache-busting query string to avoid inaccurate results.",
  "summary": "We run Escrozon , an escrow marketplace for digital assets, behind Cloudflare. A while ago we shipped a new landing page. The deploy went fine and the server returned the page, but visitors kept getting a 404 for almost an hour. Nothing was wrong with the deploy. Cloudflare had cached the 404, and we had caused it ourselves by asking for the page before it existed. What happened Before the…",
  "key_points": [
    "Escrozon's new landing page caused 404 errors after deploy.",
    "Cloudflare cached the 404 response for one hour.",
    "Purging URL or using query string resolved the issue."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}