you are sure, your upstream-servers are not answering on given ports? http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUpstreamModule#server vs http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpProxyModule#proxy_connect_timeout http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpProxyModule#proxy_read_timeout Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,240513,240521#msg-240521