there was an error processing the request

Problem

When attempting to publish a page in Confluence, an error is displayed on screen:

Prior to publishing, you may see "Changes Saved" in the bottom right corner of the editor. The page is saved as a draft, but not published. Hence the page content is stored in the draft and can be published once the PUT verb is allowed.

Diagnosis

Environment

• Confluence Server or Data Center

• Akamai CDN front end (or another CDN)

Diagnostic Steps

In your browser:

• Open developer tools in your browser, view the Network tab and reproduce the issue.

• After clicking Publish and observing the error on screen, look at the Network tab in developer tools.
• There will be a "<pageID>?status=draft" PUT request, which looks like this highlighted line:
  • 
• Select this line to view the PUT request, and navigate to the "Headers" tab:
  • 
• Confirm the following 4 items exist under General and Response Headers:
  • Request URL: <base-url>/rest/api/content/<pageid>?status=draft
  • Request Method: PUT
  • Status Code: 501 Not Implemented
  • Server: AkamaiGHost

Using curl to test via the command line:

Run the following curl command to test whether PUT verbs are allowed:

curl -u admin:admin -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{}' <base-url>

The <base-url> should be substituted for your actual base URL. However, the username and password do not matter and can be left as the example "admin:admin"

Cause

The front end, in this case Akamai, does not allow the HTTP verb "PUT" through to the Confluence server. Due to this, the page cannot be published. 

Workaround

Update the front end ruleset to allow the "PUT" verb through from the browser to the application server.