Unable to SSH into my DigitalOcean Droplet after changing UFW and DNS settings

Hi everyone,

I’ve been facing a really frustrating issue with my Droplet over the past couple of days and could really use some help or suggestions.

I have a small web app hosted on a DigitalOcean Droplet (Ubuntu 22.04). Everything was running perfectly fine — I could SSH into it, deploy code, and manage things smoothly. But recently, I made two changes:

1. I enabled and configured ufw to tighten the firewall rules.

2. I updated my domain’s DNS records (pointing to the same Droplet IP).

Right after making those changes, I suddenly lost the ability to connect to my Droplet via SSH. When I try to connect using:

 ssh root@<my-droplet-ip>

the terminal just hangs for a while and then throws a “Connection timed out” error. I’ve already double-checked that port 22 is allowed in ufw (it shows as open when I check from the console). I even tried disabling ufw temporarily from the DigitalOcean Recovery Console, but SSH still doesn’t connect.

I also checked the networking tab on the DigitalOcean dashboard to confirm the Droplet’s public IP and everything seems fine there. Ping works fine too, but SSH refuses to connect.

Could this be related to DNS propagation or something else I might have missed in my firewall setup? Or is there a chance the SSH service itself isn’t running correctly?

I’d really appreciate any advice on how to troubleshoot this safely without risking data loss. If anyone has gone through a similar issue or knows a step-by-step way to fix it (like using the Recovery Console or rebuilding SSH access), I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Thanks in advance!