App Review device never reaches our domain (NSURLErrorDomain -1001, no requests in server or Cloudflare logs)

App & System Services Networking
Elchin_97 OP
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Hello,

Our iOS app has been rejected four times under Guideline 2.1(a) because sign-in fails on the review iPad. The latest rejection showed NSURLErrorDomain error -1001 (the request timed out) on an iPad Air 11-inch (M3) with iPadOS 27.0, on November 5, 2026, at about 11:54 UTC. The same happened on October 16, 2026.

Setup:

  • API: https://wp.pavilion.az, HTTPS on port 443, fixed DNS name
  • DNS and proxy on Cloudflare (IPv4 and IPv6), publicly trusted certificate
  • The app uses URLSession, with no custom certificate checks and no proxy settings

What we checked:

  • Neither our origin server nor Cloudflare logged any request from the review device on either day. Other clients were served normally during the same minutes.
  • The domain resolves normally from many public DNS resolvers in the United States and Europe, over IPv4 and IPv6.
  • The app signs in in under one second on an iPad simulator in a data center in Los Angeles, and on our own devices through TestFlight.

This looks similar to https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/773444, where a Cloudflare-hosted domain resolved to a wrong address inside Apple's network.

Could someone from Apple check how wp.pavilion.az resolves, and whether it is reachable, from the App Review network? We have resubmitted a build that adds a short network check to the error message (the DNS result and which connection step fails), but each review cycle takes many days.

Thank you.

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DTS Engineer OP
Apple
Written by Elchin_97 in 855741021

This looks similar to https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/773444

Indeed. Consider this result from my home network:

% ping wp.pavilion.az
PING wp.pavilion.az (104.21.37.91): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 104.21.37.91: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=19.005 ms
…

but from Apple’s network [1] I see this:

% ping wp.pavilion.az
PING wp.pavilion.az (17.168.114.134): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.168.114.134: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=111.834 ms
…

Notably, that IP address is in 17.0.0.0/8, meaning it’s an Apple address.

I’ll ask Kevin how got that fixed last time.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] Which isn’t exactly the same as App Review’s network.
Elchin_97 OP

Thank you very much, Quinn. That explains everything we saw: the review device connects to 17.168.114.134 instead of Cloudflare, so the request times out and never reaches our server.

We would be grateful if this could be fixed the same way as last time. Our new build is waiting for App Review now. Is there anything we should tell App Review in the meantime, or should we just wait for the DNS entry to be corrected?