[SOLVED] Network unable to connect to certain websites without a VPN

[AlzOfPlague]

Hello everyone, first time posting here, though I have used the website for many many years when troubleshooting things on my machine. I have often been able to find a solution to fix whatever issues I’m having without having to make my own thread, however it seems here that I have been unsuccessful in finding a solution or answer to what is going on.

Okay so this problem started a few hours ago, and is across my whole home network. Some of the websites or services that I often use but can’t right now are Hulu (I can access the main page of Hulu, but whatever servers they stream with are inaccessible), Facebook, Discord, WhatsApp, there is others but these are some of the high profile ones that I’ve tried visiting, all of which work with a VPN. I have a VPN on my iPhone and tried to access these websites and I am able to without a problem.

The only things I have tried in an attempt to fix the problem is change the DNS settings in my router (I used 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, which didn’t work), and I also tried resetting my router back to factory defaults (this didn’t work so I loaded the backed up settings I saved before doing this)

I don’t really know what to do here. I am really hoping that someone here will have an idea of what is going on or if there is anything i can do to fix it.

I saw people asking for a trace route in the other threads i looked at, so here is the one I ran to facebook. I really don't know too much about how to read this or what it can say, but just in case i thought i would post it.


tracert facebook.com

Tracing route to facebook.com [31.13.93.35]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 11 ms 14 ms 8 ms dhcp.rivnet.com [198.167.228.1]
3 15 ms 13 ms 12 ms 216.183.33.202
4 10 ms 13 ms 13 ms 216.183.33.206
5 15 ms 12 ms 14 ms 216.183.39.71
6 14 ms 14 ms 13 ms 38.140.240.9
7 22 ms 20 ms 22 ms be2887.ccr41.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.47.33]
8 27 ms 24 ms 24 ms be2441.ccr31.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.41.66]
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
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 Alz-PC [192.168.1.2] reports: Destination host unreachable.

Trace complete.

 

[bill001g]

Could be a network failure between your ISP and other ISP the servers are on.

You could try 4.2.2.2 or 1.1.1.1 for dns instead but I doubt google DNS is the problem. What can happen is when parts of the network go down these sites will use DNS to switch to other IP addresses. It takes a bit for the DNS to update. They intentionally let it go slow to avoid it swapping around on very short outage.

It may not make a difference if there is no alternate servers or ip.

There is little you can do about this. The problem is in the connection router in hop 8 has with devices past it.

The reason a VPN might work is your ISP can get to the data center used by the VPN. That vpn may have connection to different ISP than yours does and can take a different path.

In most cases these type of problems clear fairly fast, the ISP generally know about these failures

 

[AlzOfPlague]

I feared that was the case. I just wanted to make sure there was nothing I could do to resolve the issue on my end. It's just annoying since i cant watch Hulu lol. I assumed the problem would clear up on its own eventually though, I will post again later if it does. But I am pretty sure you are right, so I expect it to be up any time now.

 

[AlzOfPlague]

update: everything is working as usual again. thanks for the help Bill.