Azure App Service
provides a management interface reachable through “Advanced Tools” in the
Azure Portal for controlling App Service features.
(This interface is part of the Kudu
project.) Today I discovered that if your browser does not send the HTTP
Referer header in
cross-origin requests, you will get Error 403 with the following content:
Error 403 - This web app is stopped.
The web app you have attempted to reach is currently stopped and does not accept any requests. Please try to reload the page or visit it again soon.
If you are the web app administrator, please find the common 403 error scenarios and resolution here. For further troubleshooting tools and recommendations, please visit Azure Portal.
Although this error may occur due to the site being stopped, as the message
and linked blog post suggest, in my case the cause is the Referer header not
being sent. I had configured Firefox with
network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy
set to a non-zero value for privacy reasons. Setting it to 0 resolved the
error.
