title: Can servers block curl requests specifically?
body: <p>Generally speaking, is it possible for a server to block a PHP cURL request?</p>
  
  <p>I've been making cURL requests every 15 minutes to a certain public-facing URL for about 6-8 months.  Suddenly the other day it stopped working, and the URL started returning an empty string.</p>
  
  <p>When I hit the URL in a browser or with a python get request, it returns the expected data.</p>
  
  <p>I decided to try hitting the same URL with a file_get_contents() function in PHP, and that works as expected as well.</p>
  
  <p>Since I found a bandaid solution for now, is there any difference between the default headers that cURL sends vs file_get_contents() that would allow one request to be blocked and the other to get through?</p>