Proxy Connection Refused

Connection refused happens before any HTTP status code. Your client asks to open a TCP connection, and the other side answers at once with a reset: the machine is there, but no service accepts connections on that port, or a firewall rule rejects them. Each tool words it differently:

Chromium's list of network errors defines PROXY_CONNECTION_FAILED as a failure to resolve the proxy's name or to connect a socket to it, not a failure of the website behind it.

Refused, timed out or dropped?

Three failures look alike in a log, and each has its own cause:

A timeout has its own guide: 502 Bad Gateway and 504 Gateway Timeout. A message that says the app "cannot establish" a proxy connection is the general form of this error: cannot establish proxy connection.

Check these in order; most refused connections end at step 1 or 2.

1. Host and port. Compare them with your account, character by character. For ProxyField the host is gate.proxyfield.io and the port is 7000 for HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 alike with a username and password (with the IP allowlist, the port you set up in the dashboard); a host field takes the name only, with no http:// and no spaces. The proxy format guide shows where each part goes.

2. A proxy you forgot. If the error names 127.0.0.1 or localhost, your system or browser points to a local proxy app (a debugging proxy, a VPN client, a filter) that is closed or uninstalled. Turn that setting off (how to turn off a proxy), or find the extension that set it (proxy controlled by an extension).

3. The port itself. Test the TCP connection with no proxy software in between:

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   # macOS and Linux
   nc -vz gate.proxyfield.io 7000
   # Windows PowerShell
   Test-NetConnection gate.proxyfield.io -Port 7000

   "succeeded" or TcpTestSucceeded : True means the port is reachable from this machine, so the problem is the app's settings. "Connection refused" or False means something on the way rejects the port.

4. Firewall, antivirus and the network. Allow the app to make outbound connections to port 7000, or the port you set up in the dashboard for the allowlist. Office, school and public networks often block ports other than 80 and 443: test once from another network, such as a phone hotspot.

5. The proxy end to end. One cURL request with your credentials:

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   curl -v -x gate.proxyfield.io:7000 -U "<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>" https://api.ipify.org

   The same test over SOCKS5 (socks5h lets the proxy resolve the site's name):

   ShellCopy Shell code

   curl -v --proxy socks5h://gate.proxyfield.io:7000 --proxy-user "<login>-country-us:<password>" https://api.ipify.org

   An IP address back means the proxy works from this machine over that protocol. You can also run the endpoint through the proxy checker, which takes up to 100 proxies per check and stores no requests; each check uses a small amount of proxy traffic.

6. The account. On HTTP proxies in general, a wrong password comes back after the connection opens, as an HTTP 407 status, not as a refused connection (407 Proxy Authentication Required); on SOCKS5 it ends the handshake (next section). In your ProxyField account, the dashboard shows real-time usage and remaining gigabytes, and access opens once the payment is confirmed.

The same check in Python separates the three cases (refused, timed out, name not found) before you debug your scraper:

import socket

HOST, PORT = "gate.proxyfield.io", 7000
try:
    socket.create_connection((HOST, PORT), timeout=10).close()
    print("TCP connection to the proxy port works")
except ConnectionRefusedError:
    print("refused: wrong port, or a firewall rejects the connection")
except socket.timeout:
    print("timed out: the host is wrong, or the network drops the traffic")
except socket.gaierror:
    print("the proxy host name does not resolve")

A host name that does not resolve is a DNS problem, not a refusal: see unknown proxy server and proxy DNS errors.

A SOCKS5 error that comes as a reply code means the opposite of a refused connection to the proxy: your client reached the SOCKS5 proxy, and the proxy reports what happened on its side. The codes are fixed by RFC 1928, section 6:

Codes X'09' to X'FF' are unassigned. An app that shows "SOCKS5 proxy rejected connection" is reporting a reply code such as 0x02 or 0x05; check the app's log for the code. cURL prints it in brackets: cannot complete SOCKS5 connection to example.com. (5) means reply 0x05, and the run ends with exit code 97, CURLE_PROXY, "Proxy handshake error" (libcurl error codes).

Before any reply code: the login handshake

A SOCKS5 connection starts with method negotiation (RFC 1928, section 3). The client lists the login methods it supports: X'00' no authentication, X'02' username/password. The proxy picks one, or answers X'FF', "no acceptable methods", and the client must close the connection. With username/password (RFC 1929), a STATUS other than X'00' is a failure, and the server must close the connection. So a login problem on SOCKS5 looks like a closed or refused connection, not like an HTTP error page:

On ProxyField, some site categories are restricted to protect the network, including financial and government services.

"End of file" (EOF) means the proxy closed the connection before it sent a full reply. The usual causes are a protocol mismatch (an HTTP client talking to a SOCKS5 port, or a SOCKS5 client talking to an HTTP port), a login the proxy didn't accept, or a connection cut on the way. Set the proxy type explicitly instead of "auto", check the credentials, and use socks5h:// in cURL and Python so the proxy resolves the target's name (Python requests needs pip install requests[socks] for SOCKS proxy URLs). Setup details: SOCKS5 proxies.

A dropped connection opened fine and closed before the response finished. Check the likely causes in this order:

• Idle connections. Routers, firewalls, proxies and websites close connections that sit idle. An HTTP client that keeps a pool of open connections can pick one that has already been closed, and the request fails with a reset or "end of file". Retry on connection errors; most HTTP clients can do it for you (code below).
• Long sessions. A sticky session holds one IP for the time you set with ttl, from 30 s to 36 h (20 minutes if you set none), and an IP idle for 120 s is replaced. The IP is not guaranteed if its exit node drops: on a connection error the gateway retries once with a new session, so the IP may change, and a connection that breaks is not restored. Keep long jobs inside the session time and let your client reconnect and retry every step; if a session ends well before its time, send the 24/7 live chat the time and your session details.
• Your own network. Weak Wi-Fi, a laptop going to sleep, or a VPN running under the proxy can all cut connections. Test from a wired connection with the VPN off.
• The target closes the connection. Some sites reset connections from clients they rate-limit or flag; slow down and see the 429 Too Many Requests guide.
• Your machine runs out of connections. A scraper that opens thousands of connections can hit the operating system's limit on open files or ports, and new connections fail or reset. ProxyField allows unlimited concurrent threads, but your machine and the target still have limits: cap concurrency and reuse connections.

On the ProxyField side, "If a node slows down, traffic automatically moves to the next one." This Python requests setup retries connection errors with back-off and sets separate connect and read timeouts:

import requests
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from urllib3.util.retry import Retry

proxy = "http://<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>@gate.proxyfield.io:7000"
retry = Retry(total=4, connect=3, read=2, backoff_factor=1,
              status_forcelist=[502, 503, 504], allowed_methods=["GET", "HEAD"])

session = requests.Session()
session.proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}
session.mount("http://", HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retry))
session.mount("https://", HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retry))

r = session.get("https://api.ipify.org", timeout=(10, 30))  # (connect, read) in seconds
print(r.status_code, r.text)

More Python setups: proxies in Python.

If the port test and cURL fail from two different networks with the right host, port and login, contact our 24/7 live chat with:

• the time and time zone of the failure;
• the exact error text and the tool (cURL, Python, browser, app);
• the result of nc -vz gate.proxyfield.io 7000 or Test-NetConnection;
• your public IP, if you use the allowlist.

In three account cases the ProxyField gateway answers over HTTP and HTTPS: 407 Proxy Authentication Required for an IP that is not on the allowlist, 402 Payment Required with the text ProxyField: no traffic left. Top up at https://proxyfield.io for an account with no traffic left, and no response of its own for a restricted target category. Over SOCKS5, a failed login or no traffic left ends in an authentication failure, and an exit that could not be connected gets reply 0x04.

For a proxy that fails in other ways, use the full checklist in why is my proxy not working.