It seems that sources of URL* related features are not initialized properly which leads to problems in many cases.

Please follow those steps to reproduce the problem:

• Let's deploy a test api:

    api = First @ CloudDeploy @ Delayed @ HTTPErrorResponse[404]
  

• Check:

    URLRead[api]
  

So far so good

• Copy api url string and try

      URLRead["https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/...."]
  

Should return 404, nothing unexpected.

• Now Quit[] the Kernel and run the manual check again:

      URLRead["https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/...."]    
  

What?

What is more interesting, deploy another api and run manual test for the old url, now it works again...

How to classify this feature? What to call to have stuff initialized/loaded properly?

[CASE:3855442] was created