Thousands of websites in Austria not accessible: network blocking causes internet disruption
from David Wurm 
on August 29, 2022, 13:08 pm | Write a comment
Network blocks are nothing new on the Internet - but most of the time they are simple DNS blocks. Now, after a ruling by the Austrian Supreme Court, an IP block has been ordered for the first time, with major consequences. Thousands of websites are no longer accessible in Austria with today.
By default, users use the provider's DNS server. A DNS server is responsible for "translating" the domain name into an IP address. This is activated when, for example, you techniknews.net in the browser - your own device then receives the IP address that can be reached for the website from the Internet from the DNS server. Thus the theory. While DNS blocks (usually for streaming sites due to copyright infringement) are easy to circumvent, an IP block is a little more complicated to circumvent.
IP addresses banned by Cloudflare
The "LSG, Bewusstsein von Leistungsschutzrechten GmbH" has had some IP addresses from the Cloudflare network area put on the block list. Cloudflare is a CDN provider that delivers numerous websites - these share the IP addresses. Blocking these therefore means that other, unrelated websites will also be blocked. Presumably only a few specific websites should be blocked, without considering that this IP address is used by numerous other websites.
Disturbances were already yesterday by numerous users in the LTE forum reported. Also on Reddit a discussion about it started. The Internetprovider LIWEST proceeds in the most transparent way and takes care of it a list of current bans in the web. In fact: There are numerous IP addresses listed that belong to Cloudflare.
Numerous Cloudflare IP addresses are banned. (Picture: TechnikNews/Screenshot)
What to do?
Depending on the resolution of the IP address by the DNS server, websites can sometimes work and sometimes not. Cloudflare uses so-called "load balancing" here and distributes the calls to several servers, i.e. different IPs.
Numerous websites are currently in a timeout. A ping is not possible, ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT is often displayed in the browser. The only remedy is currently a VPN from another country, since, as mentioned, this is not about blocking the DNS.
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