[ajax] Why is AJAX returning HTTP status code 0?

For some reason, while using AJAX (with my developed application) the browser just stops uploading and returns status codes of 0. Why does this happen?

This question is related to ajax http-status-codes http-status-code-415

The answer is


I had the same problem, and it was related to XSS (cross site scripting) block by the browser. I managed to make it work using a server.

Take a look at: http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/javascript-dhtml-ajax/threads/282972/why-am-i-getting-xmlhttprequest.status0


In my troubleshooting, I found this AJAX xmlhttpRequest.status == 0 could mean the client call had NOT reached the server yet, but failed due to issue on the client side. If the response was from server, then the status must be either those 1xx/2xx/3xx/4xx/5xx HTTP Response code. Henceforth, the troubleshooting shall focus on the CLIENT issue, and could be internet network connection down or one of those described by @Langdon above.


"Accidental" form submission was exactly the problem I was having. I just removed the FORM tags altogether and that seems to fix the problem. Thank you, everybody!


I found another case where jquery gives you status code 0 -- if for some reason XMLHttpRequest is not defined, you'll get this error.

Obviously this won't normally happen on the web, but a bug in a nightly firefox build caused this to crop up in an add-on I was writing. :)


In my case, I was getting this but only on Safari Mobile. The problem is that I was using the full URL (http://example.com/whatever.php) instead of the relative one (whatever.php). This doesn't make any sense though, it can't be a XSS issue because my site is hosted at http://example.com. I guess Safari looks at the http part and automatically flags it as an insecure request without inspecting the rest of the URL.


In my case, setting url: '' in ajax settings would result in a status code 0 in ie8.. It seems ie just doesn't tolerate such a setting.


In my case, it was caused by running my django server under http://127.0.0.1:8000/ but sending the ajax call to http://localhost:8000/. Even though you would expect them to map to the same address, they don't so make sure you're not sending your requests to localhost.


It is important to note, that ajax calls can fail even within a session which is defined by a cookie with a certain domain prefixed with www. When you then call your php script e.g. without the www. prefix in the url, the call will fail and viceversa, too.


In my experience, you'll see a status of 0 when:

  • doing cross-site scripting (where access is denied)
  • requesting a URL that is unreachable (typo, DNS issues, etc)
  • the request is otherwise intercepted (check your ad blocker)
  • as above, if the request is interrupted (browser navigates away from the page)

I think I know what may cause this error.

In google chrome there is an in-built feature to prevent ddos attacks for google chrome extensions.

When ajax requests continuously return 500+ status errors, it starts to throttle the requests.

Hence it is possible to receive status 0 on following requests.


Observe the browser Console while making the request, if you are seeing "The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http ajax..... reason: cors header ‘access-control-allow-origin’ missing" then you need to add "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" in response header. exa: in java you can set this like response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*") where response is HttpServletResponse.


In our case, the page link was changed from https to http. Even though the users were logged in, they were prevented from loading with AJAX.


We had similar problem - status code 0 on jquery ajax call - and it took us whole day to diagnose it. Since no one had mentioned this reason yet, I thought I'll share.

In our case the problem was HTTP server crash. Some bug in PHP was blowing Apache, so on client end it looked like this:

mirek@toccata:~$ telnet our.server.com 80
Trying 180.153.xxx.xxx...
Connected to our.server.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /test.php HTTP/1.0
Host: our.server.com

Connection closed by foreign host.
mirek@toccata:~$ 

where test.php contained the crashing code. No data returned from the server (not even headers) => ajax call was aborted with status 0.


Same problem here when using <button onclick="">submit</button>. Then solved by using <input type="button" onclick="">


Another case:

It could be possible to get a status code of 0 if you have sent an AJAX call and a refresh of the browser was triggered before getting the AJAX response. The AJAX call will be cancelled and you will get this status.


Because this shows up when you google ajax status 0 I wanted to leave some tip that just took me hours of wasted time... I was using ajax to call a PHP service which happened to be Phil's REST_Controller for Codeigniter (not sure if this has anything to do with it or not) and kept getting status 0, readystate 0 and it was driving me nuts. I was debugging it and noticed when I would echo and return instead of exit the message I'd get a success. Finally I turned debugging off and tried and it worked. Seems the xDebug debugger with PHP was somehow modifying the response. If your using a PHP debugger try turning it off to see if that helps.


In an attempt to win the prize for most dumbest reason for the problem described.

Forgetting to call

xmlhttp.send(); //yes, you need this pivotal line!

Yes, I was still getting status returns of zero from the 'open' call.


For me, the problem was caused by the hosting company (Godaddy) treating POST operations which had substantial response data (anything more than tens of kilobytes) as some sort of security threat. If more than 6 of these occurred in one minute, the host refused to execute the PHP code that responded to the POST request during the next minute. I'm not entirely sure what the host did instead, but I did see, with tcpdump, a TCP reset packet coming as the response to a POST request from the browser. This caused the http status code returned in a jqXHR object to be 0.

Changing the operations from POST to GET fixed the problem. It's not clear why Godaddy impose this limit, but changing the code was easier than changing the host.


Status code 0 means the requested url is not reachable. By changing http://something/something to https://something/something worked for me. IE throwns an error saying "permission denied" when the status code is 0, other browsers dont.


In my case, I was making a Firefox Add-on and forgot to add the permission for the url/domain I was trying to ajax, hope this saves someone a lot of time.


This article helped me. I was submitting form via AJAX and forgotten to use return false (after my ajax request) which led to classic form submission but strangely it was not completed.


Examples related to ajax

Getting all files in directory with ajax Cross-Origin Read Blocking (CORB) Jquery AJAX: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource Fetch API request timeout? How do I post form data with fetch api? Ajax LARAVEL 419 POST error Laravel 5.5 ajax call 419 (unknown status) How to allow CORS in react.js? Angular 2: How to access an HTTP response body? How to post a file from a form with Axios

Examples related to http-status-codes

Laravel - Return json along with http status code Spring: return @ResponseBody "ResponseEntity<List<JSONObject>>" HTTP status code 0 - Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain? 400 vs 422 response to POST of data Python Request Post with param data HTTP Get with 204 No Content: Is that normal Throw HttpResponseException or return Request.CreateErrorResponse? Returning http status code from Web Api controller How to specify HTTP error code? How to get HTTP response code for a URL in Java?

Examples related to http-status-code-415

How can I get the status code from an http error in Axios? Curl to return http status code along with the response Job for httpd.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status httpd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details How to deal with http status codes other than 200 in Angular 2 HTTP 415 unsupported media type error when calling Web API 2 endpoint AngularJS POST Fails: Response for preflight has invalid HTTP status code 404 Laravel - Return json along with http status code Swift Alamofire: How to get the HTTP response status code Spring Boot Rest Controller how to return different HTTP status codes? Http 415 Unsupported Media type error with JSON