Change response codes returned by CloudFront

You can configure CloudFront to return a different HTTP status code to the viewer than what CloudFront received from the origin. For example, if your origin returns a 500 status code to CloudFront, you might want CloudFront to return a custom error page and a 200 status code (OK) to the viewer. There are a variety of reasons that you might want CloudFront to return a status code to the viewer that is different from the one that your origin returned to CloudFront:

• Some internet devices (some firewalls and corporate proxies, for example) intercept HTTP 4xx and 5xx status codes and prevent the response from being returned to the viewer. In this scenario, if you substitute 200, the response is not intercepted.

• If you don’t care about distinguishing among different client errors or server errors, you can specify 400 or 500 as the value that CloudFront returns for all 4xx or 5xx status codes.

• You might want to return a 200 status code (OK) and a static website so your customers don’t know that your website is down.

If you enable CloudFront standard logs and you configure CloudFront to change the HTTP status code in the response, the value of the sc-status column in the logs contains the status code that you specify. However, the value of the x-edge-result-type column is not affected. It contains the result type of the response from the origin. For example, suppose you configure CloudFront to return a status code of 200 to the viewer when the origin returns 404 (Not Found) to CloudFront. When the origin responds to a request with a 404 status code, the value in the sc-status column in the log will be 200, but the value in the x-edge-result-type column will be Error.

You can configure CloudFront to return any of the following HTTP status codes along with a custom error page:

• 200

• 400, 403, 404, 405, 414, 416

• 500, 501, 502, 503, 504