Misconfigured CDN rule silently blocked OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs for all developers
A bot-blocking rule deployed at the CDN edge inadvertently matched the User-Agent strings of official OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs, returning 403 errors before requests ever reached the application. Browser-based human traffic was unaffected, making the issue invisible to casual monitoring, while developers using the official SDKs and AI crawlers trying to access llms.txt assets were silently blocked. The problem went undetected because the internal test suite used its own allowed User-Agent, meaning it was structurally incapable of catching the block. The issue was discovered by accident when a developer cross-checked a streaming result using the official SDK and received a 403 response. A targeted fix to the Cloudflare rule — with no application code changes — resolved the problem, restoring access for all seven tested SDK User-Agents and five AI crawler agents as confirmed in a retest on 2026-08-31.
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