What The Hell Can Make One Website Inaccessible And How Do I Fix It?

HriniakPosterChild · Jan 9, 2015

Rasputin said:
I can't access twitter. This is not a huge thing in my life, but it has been a minor annoyance long enough that I want to do something about it.

I can't access it from my laptop no matter what browser I use. I've tried Chrome, Firefox, and Explorer.

I've tried to use the Chrome app version of Tweetdeck.

I've tried on my Kindle Fire in whatever the hell they call their browser.

I've tried on my Kindle Fire in three or four different apps.

They all do the same thing, which is nothing. It just keeps trying to load until it times out.

Anyone know what the hell could cause this and more to the point, what I can do to fix it?

Have you power-cycled your cable/DSL box and your router? One way to troubleshoot connectivity issues is to turn off your computer and everything that connects you to the Internet, then turn things on starting from the wall outward. So: power up cable modem, wait for good status lights, power up router, wait for good status lights, power up computer. Then try again.

If it still doesn't work, tell us what you see when you do a "ping twitter.com" from the command line.

--
Edit: I suspect a DNS entry table somewhere is bad. I don't know why that would be. http://isup.me is a pretty good way to check if a site is really down.

Couperin47 · Jan 9, 2015

I'd suggest 'tracert twitter.com' as likely to give us a better clue

Couperin47 · Jan 9, 2015

Rasputin said:
It's been weeks, it's not twitter being down.

I tried the powering everything off thing.

Pinging gives me the following:

Pinging twitter.com [199.16.156.6] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 199.16.156.6: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=246

That repeats four times with slightly different times then

Ping statistics for 1.99.16.156.6:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% Loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds
Minimum = 54ms, Maximum = 58 ms, Average = 55ms

I'm no expert at this, but that kinda looks like data can go back and forth and something is just making it not load.

I get this:

Is it normal to bounce around at the ISP so much?

yes, there's nothing suspicious about that, and your times are all quite fast and you get there, and the urls all seem correct, which seems to rule out a poisoned DNS server.. .

The default connection to twitter seems to always be a secure (https) connection. Any chance you have the browsers set to restrict the use of secure connections ?

jercra · Jan 10, 2015

From you command prompt try the following "curl http://www.twitter.com". You should see a return code of 200 and a bunch of other crap. If you get a 200 back then the issue is in your browser. If you get something else, or nothing, then issue is in your connection.

HriniakPosterChild · Jan 10, 2015

jercra said:
From you command prompt try the following "curl http://www.twitter.com". You should see a return code of 200 and a bunch of other crap. If you get a 200 back then the issue is in your browser. If you get something else, or nothing, then issue is in your connection.

Windows PC's don't come with curl.

HriniakPosterChild · Jan 10, 2015

Couperin47 said:
The default connection to twitter seems to always be a secure (https) connection. Any chance you have the browsers set to restrict the use of secure connections ?

Ras, can you get to https://www.google.com/?

jercra · Jan 10, 2015

HriniakPosterChild said:
Windows PC's don't come with curl.

Windows 8 does and that looks like a windows 8 machine.

HriniakPosterChild · Jan 10, 2015

jercra said:
Windows 8 does and that looks like a windows 8 machine.

Wow. Color me impressed. What next? Xargs? Tar?

But if it's affecting his kindle and multiple PC browsers, it sure smells like a connection issue.

canderson · Jan 10, 2015

Who is your ISP?

HriniakPosterChild · Jan 10, 2015

So it's not https.

I'm out of ideas.

Where is Sumner when you need him most?

SumnerH · Jan 10, 2015

Only thing I can think of is that he's getting rate-limited by Twitter for some reason. But I'd think that would error rather than timing out.

charlieoscar · Jan 10, 2015

Is it possible that your ISP is being blocked?

Max Power · Jan 10, 2015

I'd be interested to see what happens if you eliminate your router. If it's separate from your cable modem, run the network cord from the cable modem directly to your laptop and reboot the modem. If it works, reset your router to factory defaults and put it back in play.

SumnerH · Jan 10, 2015

Rasputin said:
I've never been a big Twitter user, I don't think they'd even notice me, let alone fuck with me.

Yeah, I'm wondering if your ISP has you sharing an external IP address or proxying to Twitter or something nutty like that. Or if someone on the range of IPs they assign has been abusive and gotten the whole subnet rate limited or something.

It's not that likely.

Couperin47 · Jan 10, 2015

Max Power said:
I'd be interested to see what happens if you eliminate your router. If it's separate from your cable modem, run the network cord from the cable modem directly to your laptop and reboot the modem. If it works, reset your router to factory defaults and put it back in play.

It's worth a try, but if his router somehow had a block in there, the tracert should not have gone to legit twitter servers without a hitch....

jercra · Jan 10, 2015

Couperin47 said:
It's worth a try, but if his router somehow had a block in there, the tracert should not have gone to legit twitter servers without a hitch....

Trouceroute uses icmp which is a totally different protocol than the TCP used for HTTP. Outside of base connectivity ping and tracert are bad troubleshooting tools. Ras, have you ever installed or used cygwin before? If you can install that you'll get a much better suite of tools for troubleshooting, including being able to do TCP ping to a distinct port, nmap and telnet. This will tell you a lot more about your connectivity.

smastroyin · Jan 11, 2015

Do you have a neighbor you could go visit and try from their wireless network? Or just go to the local Home Depot or Starbucks or whatever and try on theirs?

With the laptop have you tried a direct connection to the modem/router? Does it have ethernet ports on it?

This is downright odd, so these suggestions would normally sound dumb to me but who knows what results you'll get.

canderson · Jan 11, 2015

SumnerH said:
Yeah, I'm wondering if your ISP has you sharing an external IP address or proxying to Twitter or something nutty like that. Or if someone on the range of IPs they assign has been abusive and gotten the whole subnet rate limited or something.It's not that likely.

I'd guess this is along the lines of the issue. iirc Windstream's subnets are large due to their infrastructure.

Bizarre though. Ras take the laptop to a coffee shop/library/wherever with free wifi and test there.

YuppieScum · Jan 11, 2015

Check with the same devices (laptop, mobile) at a friends or Starbucks. Also if you can bypass your router and connect to your modem with Ethernet, give that a try. Basically you want to verify its related to your ISP. If so, call them and explain the issue. They should be able to tell you if the issue is is in their network or if Twitter is actively blocking traffic from you.

Follow33 · Feb 7, 2015

Not sure what kind of commentary it says about me but I've been following this thread like the disappearance of Flight MH370. Any updates ?

What The Hell Can Make One Website Inaccessible And How Do I Fix It?

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