Verizon Routing blocking certain sites? Anyone else having this problem?

[SalsaShark771]

Ok, so here's the issue...

I'm off from work this month.  Since Thursday of last week (July 12th), my work website (through which our email and all of our other web portals are accessed) has been coming up as a "Website Not Available".  Same message came up on my laptop, my wife's laptop, and on my tablet.  At the time, I thought perhaps the techies at work were doing some type of server updating and that was the cause of it.

Same thing happened Friday.  That was odd.

Then Saturday.

Monday rolled around the same message came up.  No way it would be down for this long.  I called my boss and he said: Nope, nothing was wrong on his end.  I contacted our tech services.  Nope, they hadn't been doing anything.

On a lark, I disconnected my smartphone from my WiFi and used my 4G to connect, and voila!, the website worked!  Back on the WiFi, and no dough: Website Not Available.  It was something on my router's end.

So I contacted Verizon Tech Services.  45 minutes of frustration.  The online agent was NO HELP - he took remore control of my computer, installed Firefox, told me I absolutely had to use a proxy because Verizon didn't want to allow certain websites to use its services for security reasons (even though I've been accessing that website for 6 YEARS through Verizon).  Then the proxy he installed didn't even work to connect through tp my email (a simple web version of Microsoft Outlook).

I pretty much decided to DROP VERIZON'S SERVICES because of this chat window experience - I was NOT going to cheapen my online experience and be forced to use soem 3rd-rate proxy simply because Verizon changed THEIR settings.  But I wanted to give them one more chance.

Tuesday morning, I spent an hour on the phone with an tech agent who basically told me he had no idea what was wrong, that he online chat agent had no idea what he was talking about because there's no reason that a website should work for years and then all of the sudden be blocked.  He tried to connect me with a Network Tech to see what he problem is/was because nothing seemed wrong with the settings of my router (we checked through it all, did a factory reset, and even tried to establish a firewall exception for the website - no dice).  No Network technician was available, but I was told someone would get back to me within a few hours.

That was 10am.  I called back at 3pm.  45 more minutes of a different service tech trying to connect me with another Network Tech.  No one was available, but I was told it'd be within an hour that somone would be with me.

It is now 3pm Wednesday, 24 hours after that last conversation.  Still no calls back.  I've spent the last 90 minutes (unsuccessfully) looking for an email address to email my complaint/concerns/issues to the company.

The best I can do is find THIS discussion forum.  I want to open the window and scream, but it's too **bleep** hot out there.

I am (hopefully undestandably) frustrated with this.  It seems to be that some ridiculous exception was made for my work's websites being routed through my area as my other co-workers report no other similar outages or frustrations with their connections.

Anyone else experiencing this?

[Hubrisnxs · Accepted solution]

This has happened from time to time - but was not Verizon Blocking the website, but the other way around, the website usually will have an out of date bogon filter.    Verizon constantly is giving out new ip addresses to customers, sometimes with brand new IP Blocks as they get more and more customers.  So sometimes the filters in websites, are out of date and don't include the newest ip blocks.  

Usually you can engage the website owner, ask them to update their bogon filter list with your subnet,  but if that is not easy, then you can turn off your router at night when you go to bed, the 4 hour lease on your ip address will break, 2 to four more hours pass, and your ip will go to a different customer, or cycled back into the cloud, and then when you wake up and turn it back on you will have a new ip, that is likely not blocked.   

So give that a try.  OR if you are in a rush and need it asap, then release your DHCP ip leave your modem off for at least 10-30 minutes, so your IP can get cycled back into the cloud and you can get a new one.  if you do it too fast, then you will likely get the same ip and that defeats the purpose.  

[lasagna]

Post the results of a traceroute from your machine to the site in question.   Let's just see where and if there's a routing issue.  I am sure Verizon is not intentionally blocking access -- but local issues on machines as well as global routing tables (or asymetric firewall paths st the other end) all get whacked from time to time.

[SalsaShark771]

The Service Tech did a bunch of legwork in all of this regard and found (from his own computers in the office) that website was being blocked (but, he also said that it could be the case that he has to go through a proxy server to access outside services).

As it is, the tech seemed as baffled as I was, saying he has never seen this happen, especially since the site was easily accessed for years prior to all of this happening (though the online chat representative indicated that Verizon does indeed block sites it deems security risks - however, I'm fairly certain the security standards are very up-to-snuff on the school district web portal which i am trying to access).

I'm going to try the "shut it down for 8 hours and see what'll happen" method to see if that;ll do the trick - we were on vacation for a week and there were a few power outages in the area; perhaps there was an outage long enough to cause an accidental "reassignment" as described in the suggested method above (which i am going to try to purposefully put into effect this night).

Thanks for all the tips so far folks.

[SalsaShark771]

Here's the traceroute results, though U;d never done one to this site before to know if the "timeouts" are in any particular "telling" spots (I'm not good at reading these results):

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]

C:\tracert sharepoint.ewrsd.k12.nj.us

Tracing route to sharepoint.ewrsd.k12.nj.us [208.64.144.136]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     4 ms     5 ms     5 ms  L100.CMDNNJ-VFTTP-26.verizon-gni.net [98.110.50.1]
  3     5 ms    10 ms     6 ms  G0-3-4-6.CMDNNJ-LCR-21.verizon-gni.net [130.81.187.112]
  4    11 ms    13 ms    11 ms  so-0-3-0-0.NWRK-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.22.0]
  5    19 ms    17 ms    17 ms  xe-1-0-2-0.NY5030-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.23.184]
  6    17 ms    18 ms    19 ms  0.ae5.BR3.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.16.9]
  7    40 ms    40 ms    41 ms  te-7-3-0.edge2.NewYork2.level3.net [4.68.111.137]
  8    56 ms    56 ms    57 ms  vlan51.ebr1.NewYork2.Level3.net [4.69.138.222]
  9    46 ms    46 ms    44 ms  ae-4-4.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.69.141.17]
 10    54 ms    54 ms    56 ms  ae-2-2.ebr1.Newark1.Level3.net [4.69.132.98]
 11    48 ms    58 ms    51 ms  ae-11-51.car1.Newark1.Level3.net [4.69.156.5]
 12    19 ms    21 ms    17 ms  DATA-NETWOR.car1.Newark1.Level3.net [4.59.189.106]
 13    27 ms    26 ms    23 ms  208.64.149.18
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Trace complete.

C:\

[SalsaShark771]

This worked. 

I hope the Big Red Checkmark monitors these boards so it can forward this easy fix solution to its Chat and Service Techs (as opposed to having them go the ridiculous route of installing off-the-wall proxy programs and/or basically suggesting that their services are quirky some of the time and they cannot do anything about it).

Thanks for the help!

[tophercox2014]

What did you do to fix it?