Cloudinary PDF “Blocked for Delivery”

Cloudinary PDF "Blocked for Delivery" Even Though Access Is Set to Public? Here's Why.

If you've ever uploaded a PDF to Cloudinary, set its access control to Public, and still seen "Blocked for delivery," you're not alone. I ran into this recently, and it had nothing to do with the file itself.

The cause: Cloudinary has an account-level security setting called "Prevent delivery of PDF and ZIP files". When enabled, it overrides the individual file's access control settings. So even if the asset shows "public," the CDN blocks delivery globally.

The fix is simple:

Go to your Cloudinary Dashboard
Navigate to Settings → Security
Find the option "Restrict PDF and ZIP files delivery."
Uncheck it and save

That's it. Your PDFs will start delivering immediately.

Why does this happen? Cloudinary enables this restriction by default on some accounts as a security measure — PDFs can embed scripts and malicious content, so they treat them differently from images. Images have no such global restriction, which is why images work fine under "public" access, while PDFs don't.

Key takeaway: Per-asset access control and account-level security settings are two separate layers in Cloudinary. If something is blocked despite being "public," always check your account's Security settings first before debugging your upload code.

Hope this saves someone a few hours of head-scratching!