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Waiting Room
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Waiting Room
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Cloudflare Waiting Room

Cloudflare Waiting Room protects websites by queueing site visitors when a website experiences unmanageable surges in legitimate traffic that may otherwise bring an application down.

​​ Benefits

Waiting Room protects your origin server by preventing surges in legitimate traffic that may overload your origin.

Waiting Room also benefits your visitors by:

  • Keeping your application online and preventing them from reaching error pages.
  • Showing estimated wait times that are continuously updated.
  • Opening up new spots more quickly by tracking dynamic inflow and outflow.
  • Remembering each visitor’s status to prevent someone from losing their place in line or having to re-queue if they leave your site.
  • Appearing in your own branding and style, which enhances trust and lets you provide additional information as needed.

​​ How it works

Once you have created and activated a waiting room for a specific application page:

  • If a page is not experiencing heavy traffic, a visitor accesses the page directly.
  • If page traffic crosses a user-defined threshold, a visitor enters a virtual waiting room until it is their turn to access the page:
    • Each user receives a cookie to manage the dynamic outflow of requests from the waiting room to the origin website in First In First Out (FIFO) order.
    • While in the waiting room, the user’s browser automatically refreshes every 20 seconds to give them updated information about their estimated wait time.
    • When a user exits the waiting room and reaches your application, they can leave and re-enter without waiting for the length of time specified by the session duration.
    • Because waiting rooms support dynamic inflow and outflow, new spots appear more quickly and estimated wait times are lower and more accurate.

Waiting Room process flow showing how a request is managed by Cloudflare and placed in a waiting room before reaching the origin website

​​ Availability

The following customers have access to Cloudflare Waiting Room:

Access to certain features depends on a customer’s plan type.

​​ Prerequisites

  • Cloudflare’s CDN is required to use the Waiting Room feature.
  • Configure a proxied DNS record or a proxied load balancer for the waiting room’s hostname. A DNS record is not auto-configured after a waiting room is created.
  • Visitors must enable cookies. Refer to Waiting Room cookies for information on how cookies are used in Cloudflare Waiting Room.

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