Cloudflare and Safari

[david_blanchard]

From a previous thread…

@josehill

I don’t know why, but Cloudflare in Safari seems particularly sensitive.

I have been having a lot of trouble with Cloudflare in Safari today (Sunday). Sites repeatedly ask me to prove I am human and not a bot. Using a different browser (Firefox, Orion, Brave, others) works fine – it just seems to be Safari.

I have visited the Cloudflare help page and followed their instructions (turn off content blockers, turn off Safari fingerprinting, use Private mode, etc.) but nothing seems to work.

I am running Safari v26.4 and Sequoia v15.7.5.

Anybody else seeing this?

[josehill]

I had the feeling that Cloudflare was popping up a little more than usual in the last 24 hours, and I also thought the verification was taking a little longer than usual. I was able to get to every site I was trying to reach, though.

Edited to add: I also am running Safari v26.4 and Sequoia v15.7.5.

[Scott5 (Scott)]

Yes, I too have had to arm wrestle with the “Verify you are a human” dialog. It just endlessly loops, occasionally re-displaying the empty checkbox to start the process again.

Tried in a newly installed Firefox as well—similar failure to get logged in.

Turning off Apple’s Private Relay allowed a completed login to TidBITS Talk in Safari, but login at TidBITS Home was still broken though differently.

Probably related; there are no comments on the last four articles posted at TidBITS.com.

On macOS 15.7.4, Safari 26.4.

[david_blanchard]

Jeff Johnson (StopTheMadnessPro) recently posted an article about this issue with Safari and Cloudflare and has filed a bug report with Apple.

When “Prevent cross-site tracking” is enabled, Cloudflare challenges require an extra step, to manually click “Verify you are human.” This extra step is not required when “Prevent cross-site tracking” is disabled, nor is it required at all in Chrome or Firefox.

In his search for the cause, he found an even more troubling bug (emphasis added):

Subsequently, I’ve discovered an even worse problem: Safari Technology Preview 243: Safari extension breaks Cloudflare challenges. In short, if an extension is enabled in Safari Technology Preview, it also breaks Cloudflare challenges, but in this case “Verify you are human” doesn’t work either, so there’s no way to get past the challenge! Hopefully this bug doesn’t make its way into regular Safari, or it will be a disaster for Safari extensions.