The reason I didn’t post anything on Wednesday was that I couldn’t access my blog. The platform it is hosted on has been much more stable since I switched providers a couple of years ago but sometimes things hit a glitch. Since I’m not broadcasting to an audience of thousands or relying on my blog to generate an income, I decided I could wait to see if it resolved itself and went to bed. BTW, technical details ahead, mainly for my future reference. If the rest of this post sounds like gobbledigook, don’t worry!

The next morning it was still down. In fact, I couldn’t access any of my websites (all run off the same host) although downforeveryoneorjustme.com said it was fine. I could get on myself if I used 4G on my phone, suggesting it was an issue with the fact I was otherwise using Toob, the ISP I recently switched to. Some searching suggested that Toob DNS could be an issue but switching to Google’s 8.8.8.8 service didn’t make a difference. I contacted Toob and they quickly responded, suggesting I turn off IPV6 on my router. That also failed to resolve the issue but I had other things to get on with and left it for a while.

One other thing I had done was run traceroute, which seemed to suggest my signal was getting to Krystal’s (my webhost) servers before being cut off. I could still get through on my phone and it also worked if I ran a VPN service, which hides the original source of your Internet connection. I decided to contact Krystal in the evening, even through their main website, which I could access, didn’t suggest I was being blocked by their firewall. They came back quite quickly and it turned out my requests for pages were being denied by a service called Imunify360. I’m not entirely sure why it had acted and neither were they. Apparently it has been running for a while so I’m still suspicious that Toob (which makes my internet connection appear to come from Southampton) may be doing something which caused the flag.

The block has been lifted and all seems good for now. However, I wonder if this kind of thing will happen more often as service providers apply an increasing range of “intelligent” systems to try and protect against malicious activity? If it hadn’t been my own blog host but a service I have no support rights on, I’d still be in the dark and locked out. Any arms race invites collateral damage.