Unable to access the website from Brazil

[Davi Medrade]

Hello. A few weeks ago I noticed that I was unable to access the website from my home connection (500 Mbps fiber) as well as from my phone using cellular data over 5G or 4G. I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and my provider is Vivo (not the cell phone manufacturer; this one is one of the largest phone and internet providers in Brazil, owned by Spanish telecom provider Telefonica).

From what I could ascertain, the packets just get lost somewhere along the way and never get to the server. One thing I notice is that it happens with both the authoritative DNS server for the gayauthors.org domain name (I tested with ns1.unyhosting.com, which is 72.52.196.5), as well as with the gayauthors.org web server directly, when I managed to find the IP address (173.199.153.186) and tested it directly.

These are my results:

The packet loss is not intermittent, it happens every single time, with every single packet sent to either of those IP addresses from my Vivo fiber connection (which has a dynamic IP address that is now 177.160.164.162 and shouldn't change for the next few days, unless something causes the router to reboot or something like that). The exact same thing happens from my phone on mobile data (my mobile provider is Vivo as well).

Everyone I know also has Vivo as a provider so I can't even determine if it only affects traffic from Vivo. When I repeated the tests from a friend's fiber connection I got the same results. His provider is Vivo too, but it's a business plan with a static IP address (191.13.249.51).

Here is where it gets weird: even when I used well-established DNS resolvers like 8.8.8.8 (from Google) and 1.1.1.1 (from Cloudflare), they aren't able to perform the query on the authoritative server either. I don't think both Google and Cloudflare also have Vivo/Telefonica as a provider, but they do route requests to servers geographically close to the user, so I can be quite sure based on the latency that the resolvers that got my request (and failed to connect to the authoritative DNS as well) were very close (not surprising since Sao Paulo is the largest city in the country and all the global internet-related companies have data centers in the area).

Now, when I connect from either of the dedicated servers my company rents from OVH at their Beauharnois campus in Quebec, Canada, one (15.235.54.163) running Windows Server 2019 and the other (51.79.18.202) running Ubuntu 22.04, it works perfectly. No packet loss, no excessive or fluctuating latency, no problem at all.

Attached are screenshots of identical tracepath commands to the gayauthors.org webserver, one from my connection at home and the other from the server in the datacenter in Canada.

I'm not claiming that GayAuthors or your hosting provider caused this, but I don't know enough about big networks and public IP routing to say anything meaningful to Vivo about it so if I tried they would just say it's some misconfiguration either on your server on in my network and I wouldn't know how to argue otherwise. If you or your hosting provider could help pinpoint exactly what is wrong and where, it would help me a lot.

Cheers.

[ReaderPaul]

I don't know either, but does the national government or Vevo have a filter that blocks certain websites?

A friend works for a college in the state west of me, run by the VERY conservative legislature, and it is required that his internet system of the college block words like ass, p*ssy, f***, ass****, and some others.  Many of the websites are also blocked by name, as well.

Could that be the problem?

 

[Mike Carss]

Have you tried contacting Vivo directly about this? Chances are that's going to be your best bet in solving the issue. I don't think the GA team can do much from their end.

If I was to guess, it's possible GA's IP address was inadvertently included in a series of IP addresses blocked for one reason or another -- piracy being a likely culprit. For example, according to this article from 2023, Vivo is known to block The Pirate Bay: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/claro-oi-tim-e-vivo-bloqueiam-the-pirate-bay-no-brasil-apos-operacao-404/

That's not to say TPB and GA have similar IP addresses, but it's possible other pirate sites do. Brazil is well known for being very LGTBQ+ friendly, so I highly doubt the site was blocked for GA being a gay-centric site.

Since your tests of tunnelling through a server in Canada have been successful, have you tried using a VPN service to access GA using Vivo? Proton VPN works well, is trustworthy, and their free option would work fine that purpose.

If you do find a solution that works, take the time to share your findings (as you already have) so others can learn from it. Good luck! ❤️

[Myr]

Our firewall whacked Brazil due to constant and excessive DOS attacks and hacking attempts to access the server. It's supposed to clear after a time, so if it was still going, it probably keeps getting retriggered.

[Jack Poignet]

FYI: It’s probably unrelated to this specific topic, but loading times for a GA page in Germany (mobile or FTTH) are usually quite long, sometimes even over a minute. I was in the USA a few months ago and - using the same devices - it worked perfectly fast there.

[Myr]

The server is located in the middle of the USA.  It shouldn't make that much of a difference though.  I have no reports of slow loading anywhere though.

[Davi Medrade]

It's working fine from my home connection now. Thank you.

[Jack Poignet]

On 5/6/2025 at 12:08 AM, Myr said:

The server is located in the middle of the USA.  It shouldn't make that much of a difference though.  I have no reports of slow loading anywhere though.

I suspect it‘s not the server but has something to with all the ads and possible reroutings to get localised ads… Just thought I‘d let you know. Anyway, thanks for all the good work on here. I greatly appreciate this platform 🤗