What Is a 444 Status Code?

A non-standard status code used to instruct nginx to close the connection without sending a response to the client, most commonly used to deny malicious or malformed requests.

This status code is not seen by the client, it only appears in nginx log files.

• Source: nginx documentation

444 status code example

Here is an example of a 444 status code:

Request

GET /example HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

Response

HTTP/1.1 444 No Response
Server: nginx/1.10.1
Connection: close

In this example, the server has closed the connection without sending any response to the client, resulting in a 444 status code.

What causes a 444 status code?

A 444 status code typically indicates that the server has returned no response to the client and closed the connection. This can happen for several reasons, including:

• The server or network may be experiencing a temporary or permanent issue, causing it to be unable to respond to the client’s request.
• The client may have made a request that the server is unable to process or that violates server policies, causing the server to terminate the connection.
• A firewall or security software may be blocking the request or the response, causing the connection to be closed without a response.

It is important to note that the 444 status code is not a standard HTTP status code, but rather a non-standard status code used by some servers to indicate a connection closed without a response.

How to troubleshoot a 444 status code

The 444 status code is not a standard HTTP status code and is specific to the Nginx web server. It indicates that the connection to the server was closed without any response from the server. Since it is specific to Nginx, troubleshooting this error requires checking the Nginx configuration and logs.

Here are some steps that can help troubleshoot a 444 status code:

• Check the Nginx error log for any relevant messages that might indicate the cause of the error.
• Check the Nginx configuration to ensure that it is properly configured to handle requests.
• Check for any firewall or security software that might be blocking the connection.
• Ensure that the server has enough resources to handle the request.
• Check if there are any networking issues that might be causing the connection to be closed.

If none of the above steps resolve the issue, it might be necessary to seek the help of a qualified web developer or system administrator to troubleshoot the issue further.

Additional resources

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