Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29938544

by kzrdude • 5 years ago

273 167 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Reddit returns a 403 page with content "Blocked" right now for many firefox users.

Apparently not with Chromium. Probably a blocking mishap ongoing (as of this posting) at reddit.

jmholla2• 5 years ago

I just saw the same thing. Guess my productivity is going to skyrocket.

born2discover• 5 years ago

Just came here to see if I was the only one seeing that. HN never disappoints.

0x7E32• 5 years ago

It seems to work fine for me.

How many is 'many'?

luca6163• 5 years ago

What browser? Firefox seems to be the only one affected right now

danuker3• 5 years ago

I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium as well.

0x7E32• 5 years ago

Firefox. On desktop.

decrypt2• 5 years ago

Loads okay for me too.

hdb2• 5 years ago

same exact thing here.

luca6163• 5 years ago

I guess this means I'll actually have to do some work today :(

rb666• 5 years ago

Same here, thought it must be me! Related to the earlier http3 issue?

arprocter2• 5 years ago

That's what I guessed, but the http3 fix has no effect

Changing user-agent doesn't do anything either

Sharparam2• 5 years ago

Spoofing the user-agent to look like Chrome made reddit work for me when using Firefox.

luca6163• 5 years ago

Confirmed Firefox only on my devices

po1nter• 5 years ago

Good to know I'm not the only one. I thought I was IP banned or something. It works when accessed with Edge (chromium)

*EDIT:* Looks like it's back up.

ncann• 5 years ago

Initially I thought my account was banned, so I tried incognito mode and it didn't work either, so I knew it was not an account ban.

Then I thought it was an IP ban so I tried on my phone and it worked, so I knew it was not an IP ban.

The only reasonable explanation from that point on was something bad was going on on reddit side.

tstrimple• 5 years ago

Hah! These were my exact same steps as well. I was wondering which of my nonsense finally pushed them over the edge and IP banned me.

throwawaytitty• 5 years ago

I was wondering if I had been IP banned or something. I can confirm this only happens on Firefox for me and that Chromium is working.

nathancahill• 5 years ago

Do HN next (for my productivity).

anticensor2• 5 years ago

Different teams.

canadianwriter• 5 years ago

Interesting - was getting buggier and buggier as I used it today before the "blocked" started showing up. Super curious to see what caused the issue.

depereo• 5 years ago

Their status page had rising error rates and a big voting backlog spike for some time before I hit the 403 issue personally.

niszhant• 5 years ago

HTML only says <body><pre>Blocked</pre></body>

yeee• 5 years ago

blocked here, all other browsers work fine

anm89• 5 years ago

Hopefully this will be permanent.

danuker3• 5 years ago

No more Reddit procrastination for me I guess. I hope so too.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 5 years ago

We can only hope.

In all seriousness, it feels like it was a long time coming. There were indications that web is moving towards one approved browser. It is just our luck that one browser is Chrome.

Pxtl4• 5 years ago

Honestly, the number of complex web-applications that are degrading slowly in firefox is only getting longer. At my office: the HR benefits system is completely broken in FF, some of our training modules in the training system fail, Azure DevOps needs me to close the browser completely and re-open to clear some kind of JS or shadow state or something...

It's bad and getting worse and I don't know how much longer I can stick with FF.

sevenf0ur• 5 years ago

It's for the best, really.

nomorecommas• 5 years ago

There's a lot of useful information contained within Reddit, not just memes, celebrity worship, and porn. I'd like to see decentralized alternatives flourish.

area51org• 5 years ago

THANK YOU. I thought it was just me. And Chrome works fine! Bizarre.

sup1993• 5 years ago

Same problem. Its fine on chrome.

pabloescobyte• 5 years ago

Blocked only on all my machines. Reddit iOS app is fine, Safari on mac OS is fine as well.

I too was worried I was IP banned!

Animats• 5 years ago

Yes, just hit that myself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/who_else_...

danudey• 5 years ago

That thread is from two months ago.

hexagonsun• 5 years ago

im seeing the same

dreamer_• 5 years ago

same here (Poland)

Nasreddin_Hodja• 5 years ago

#metoo

Faking User-Agent header doesn't help.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 5 years ago

This is interesting now. What are some other simple ways of identifying a browser?

anticensor2• 5 years ago

Request patterns

BitterAmethyst• 5 years ago

There are JS objects you can look for, `window.chrome` for example is present on Chromium browsers but not Firefox.

infinityplus1• 5 years ago

Anyone tried changing the user agent?

captain_ahabb• 5 years ago

Interestingly, doing a request from thunder client with firefox as the user agent returns 200 OK...

nullc• 5 years ago

Alphabet investment in Reddit confirmed.

MMAesawy• 5 years ago

Getting a 403 on FF, yes.

bvhammersmark2• 5 years ago

good to see this thread, hope this gets fixed.

JonahSussman• 5 years ago

I can't help but have a sinking feeling that this as a result of the wider trend of using only Chromium-based browsers. If they were the ones affected by this issue, I feel like it would get solved almost immediately.

function_seven2• 5 years ago

I feel like it would get solved almost immediately.

Hell, probably wouldn't have even made it to production.

waffle_maniac2• 5 years ago

Seems a bit of a dramatic take. I think Firefox has a few engineers on staff.

jdlshore• 5 years ago

I think GP's point was Reddit breaking Chrome would cause a big uproar and result in the issue being fixed quickly, not that Chrome has more engineers.

dabluecaboose• 5 years ago

The wild west internet of our youths is dying, and these are the death throes.

tzs• 5 years ago

I was seeing problems in Chrome a couple hours ago. In the fancy editor it was taking seconds to echo, and the cursor would jump to the start of the text, and placeholder text was not being replaced with typed text. The older editor where you have to manually enter markdown worked fine.

I assumed they had done something that botched the JavaScript of the site. Maybe some update went badly today, and it manifests differently in Firefox and Chrome?

Anyway, whatever it was either they didn’t test well in Chrome either, or they don’t use the fancy editor themselves.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

Switching to the old manual markdown mode was fine.

Good to know. This new editor doesn't work at all for me in Firefox, just a frustrating chaos of random bugs.

sebzim4500• 5 years ago

I use chrome and Reddit is incredibly buggy quite often. Normally old.reddit.com works, but it is shocking how badly made such a big site is.

edgyquant• 5 years ago

It’s so bad half the time I think they have to be trolling their own users.

millzlane2• 5 years ago

It was fixed within an hour or so. I didn't even realize, surfing on reddit and it was working. I was just mindlessly surfing like I normally do and then it clicked, "oh cool, Reddit is back up".

eliasmacpherson• 5 years ago

maybe it's a blessing in disguise.

78.14.0esr (32-bit) on rpi4 works

both of these on x86-64 do not:

- 96.0.1

- 95.0.2

oh it's working again as of 7.13pm GMT

danuker3• 5 years ago

I also get the "Blocked" in Firefox, and I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium.

As for Chrome, I won't install it and will rather give up on Reddit.

valtis• 5 years ago

It appears so: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s3zop9/desktop_site_s...

josalhor2• 5 years ago

Seems fixed? I just checked with FF.

Also from a Reddit Admin: > We believe we've tracked down the issue that was impacting some of your bots. There may be some lingering 403 issues as we hash it all out over the next day or so

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/comment/h...

cm21872• 5 years ago

not for me

Bilal_io4• 5 years ago

The post you're referencing is two months old.

josalhor2• 5 years ago

My bad, you're right. I mistook "2m" as 2 minutes ago, not two months.

bvhammersmark2• 5 years ago

good to see I'm not the only one. Chrome and Edge work fine. I hope this gets fixed.

radlad• 5 years ago

Yes, I see "Blocked"

Bilal_io4• 5 years ago

Same here. Tried to fake the agent to Chrome 87 and was still blocked.

Edit: 14:23EST - it's back online for me.

Pxtl4• 5 years ago

Oooh, so it's not user-agent it's detecting, but something else?

Bilal_io4• 5 years ago

It seems to be an http3 issue. Trying to find a way to replicate it in a Chromium browser. I am trying to understand whether it is a Firefox specific issue, or if it's Reddit not handling the fallback.

Seggan2• 5 years ago

Whew. Thought someone was messing with my computer. Can confirm Firefox only.

stgnet2• 5 years ago

Waterfox is working. Must be something new that FF is doing.

stgnet2• 5 years ago

... and suddenly FF is working again. Somebudy dun goofed.

weare138• 5 years ago

Same here

CyberMuz• 5 years ago

Yes, me too. What is happening?

Seggan2• 5 years ago

Whew. Thought someone was messing with my compute. Can confirm Firefox only.

adl• 5 years ago

Here is some more info: https://twitter.com/FirefoxSupport/status/148159226614171648...

There is a thread on /r/firefox (Use Chrome or Edge to see it) https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2utvv/psa_solutio...

irrational2• 5 years ago

Firefox has witnessed outages recently

How does a browser experience "outages"? Uh... In my mind it is just a tool and any outage would have to be on the part of the server/website I am trying to browse.

foxfluff• 5 years ago

It hit a bug that causes it to busyloop. It would do that even if you don't visit any site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052

arsfeld• 5 years ago

None of that is working for me, I think it's a different issue.

politelemon• 5 years ago

Although that's from yesterday, that's a separate issue, browsing wasn't working for any site.

In this case the Reddit servers are responding with a 403

huhtenberg• 5 years ago

old.reddit.com is accessible just fine under 88.

asdff2• 5 years ago

Old reddit still works

function_seven2• 5 years ago

Not for me. Getting same "Blocked" message, but only on FF.

asdff2• 5 years ago

Weird, it works for me on FF. 96.0

neilsimp1• 5 years ago

old.reddit.com is showing "Blocked" for me, FF 95.0.2.

Edit: Updated to 96.0, and Reddit is back again.

Alvarito0505062• 5 years ago

That's what I use, and it isn't working for me.

rvieira• 5 years ago

Not even old reddit works for me.

DaftDank• 5 years ago

It is for me

bluely• 5 years ago

spent a good part of my morning trying to figure out why Reddit was down but nobody on the internet mentioned that. Tried chrome and Reddit is fine, so something weird must be going on with FF

nathias• 5 years ago

not for nightly

alana314• 5 years ago

Guess I'll get some work done

hackingthelema• 5 years ago

Interestingly, it works just fine in the console/text-based browsers links, elinks, and lynx.

cm21872• 5 years ago

Can it be related to the http3 downgrade firefox did yesterday?

_eric• 5 years ago

Looks like it is, yes. A couple hours ago I was getting an error here and there, but now it doesn't load anything at all.

irrational2• 5 years ago

Oh, I thought it was just me. What a strange error. I've never seen just the word blocked and nothing else. Even viewing the source shows nothing else. And it works fine in Chrome. So... I assume this is something Firefox did?

jasfi• 5 years ago

I died when I first saw the message. I do marketing on Reddit for my upcoming SaaSs, but try to stay within the rules. So I thought they were trying to ban me!

everyone2• 5 years ago

Also replying has been broken for a long time. By default it uses "fancy pants" editor when you are typing reply, and this is totally broken. You have to switch to another mode to reply.

Alvarito0505062• 5 years ago

It works on Iceweasel 38 :P

espadrine• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is related to Firefox’ woes with HTTP/3[0] that prevented it from loading all pages the other day.

Either way, events such as these are likely to cause an increase in migration from Firefox to Chrome.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908

rcMgD2BwE72F• 5 years ago

Doubt it. I've been accessing Reddit with Firefox v96 without issues for quite some time.

nanny2• 5 years ago

I don't think so, my Firefox was requesting with HTTP/2.

awalGarg• 5 years ago

Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!

db48x2• 5 years ago

No, it is definitely getting back a 403 from the server:

    HTTP/2 403 Forbidden
    retry-after: 0
    content-type: text/plain
    accept-ranges: bytes
    date: Fri, 14 Jan 2022 19:10:51 GMT
    via: 1.1 varnish
    cache-control: private, max-age=3600
    strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains
    x-content-type-options: nosniff
    x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
    x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
    server: snooserv
    x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
    content-length: 7
    X-Firefox-Spdy: h2

c4ss4ndr42• 5 years ago

Works on Safari, but is 'blocked' on Firefox... I was researching Ukrain-Russian relations, and posting in r/Worldnews at the time regarding the recent news. Wondering if it's related, or if lots of users are experiencing this.

monsieurgaufre• 5 years ago

Happens to me as well.

everyone2• 5 years ago

Also replying has been broken for a long time. By default it uses "fancy pants" editor when you are typing reply, and this is totally broken. You have to switch to another mode to reply.

howdydoo• 5 years ago

Libreddit still works

https://libredd.it/

krono3• 5 years ago

Looks like FireFox is actually blocking Reddit rather than the other way around.

Edit: Firefox blocked the site from loading as it would have been unsafe to attempt due to the encoding problem. I wasn't implying anything else and even posted the browser's own error message. Relax.

Check your console:

    The character encoding of the plain text document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the file needs to be declared in the transfer protocol or file needs to use a byte order mark as an encoding signature.

CyberShadow2• 5 years ago

No, that just means that there is no encoding sent in the header (or HTML http-equiv tag).

Anyway, it's back up for me.

krono3• 5 years ago

Yes no encoding so unsafe to render, therefore Firefox blocked it. Wasn't implying anything else.

sdflhasjd• 5 years ago

It's just a warning firefox is logging because the "Blocked" response is just `text/plain` and doesn't have a header specifying the character encoding.

krono3• 5 years ago

Yes, the browser wasn't sure if its render engine would get stuck, but there was a big chance it would only end up dumping a bunch of garbled text on screen anyway (of a different sort than usual :) ). Therefore it decided to simply not load the file at all.

In other words, Firefox literally blocked the website from loading and that's precisely what I said.

c4ss4ndr42• 5 years ago

Blocked on firefox but not on Safari. Also other computers in my house on the same IP are not blocked.

I was researching Russian-Ukranian relations abd posting in r/worldnews about the crisis there. Wondering if it's related, or if lots of users are experiencing this as a blanket issue.

89vision• 5 years ago

Seems to be working for me. Is it only blocked for users that are logged in?

wongarsu• 5 years ago

Works for me too, both logged in, logged out, on old and new reddit. Maybe the change hasn't rolled out to all regions yet?

jmholla2• 5 years ago

It's back up now. I was hitting it a few minutes ago. Some reddit engineer must've seen Hacker News or uses Firefox.

nanny2• 5 years ago

Nope, it didn't load in incognito mode for me either.

alex4e• 5 years ago

Same for me (Ukraine) on both Firefox on Windows and Android. Firefox Focus on Android works fine, though. As well as Chrome, Edge, etc.

gigglesupstairs• 5 years ago

It’s happening in India too, if it’s any consolation

smudgy• 5 years ago

Phew.... Not just me.

mapledipdonut• 5 years ago

Anyone else have the immediate reaction/thought "oh God, IT has finally caught on and blocked reddit because of me"?

zer0w1re• 5 years ago

I panicked for a few minutes waiting for IT to knock on my office door...

millzlane2• 5 years ago

Yep, I was looking at pictures of cannabis flowers the moment it happened.

bill_from_tampa2• 5 years ago

I'm at home, and I thought my ISP had decided reddit was unhealthy for me. But when I found I could ping reddit and still access it from the reddit app on my tablet computer I decided it was some mystery reddit error.

kd913• 5 years ago

Uhh not really having any problems with me on Firefox 96 on Ubuntu. Granted I didn't have an issue with the HTTP3 bug either.

decrypt2• 5 years ago

Same boat. Didn't have an issue with HTTP3 two days ago, no reddit outage either. I wonder if my DNS resolver is helping somehow. I use Adguard.

elxr• 5 years ago

It has already been fixed.

snake_plissken• 5 years ago

How exactly do they determine it's Firefox? I tried it from Postman using the same headers from Firefox and I get a 200, and fidgeting with the headers in Firefox doesn't change anything.

bspammer• 5 years ago

Maybe they're detecting some signature in the TLS negotiation?

kzrdude• 5 years ago

Looks like this was active all of 20-25 minutes, and now it's over. :)

gamblor956• 5 years ago

Works fine for me on Firefox...

punk_ihaq• 5 years ago

Resolved: "Blocked" error when accessing reddit.com on Firefox. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_block...

diogenesjunior• 5 years ago

you can't help but admire the intellectual elite of hacker news users that don't actually know anything about technology

linking to month old issues, thinking html encoding warnings are somehow related, thinking http3 is an issue when you have just to press f12 to see it's not used

trashface• 5 years ago

They should do this more, I needed the break.

mkl95• 5 years ago

I love Reddit, but it has the worst popularity to UX ratio I've ever seen. They try very hard at making their web UI annoying so you switch to their mobile app.

pedrogpimenta3• 5 years ago

Indeed. It sucks so much I built my own :)

brian_herman• 5 years ago

Are you the apollo guy?

blocked_again• 5 years ago

Also build a time machine and go back to 2005 so that you get the network effect and someone will actually use your site.

moneywoes• 5 years ago

Do you think they are going to limit their api like Twitter?

darkteflon• 5 years ago

Could you share a link?

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

You're good until they shut down their API I guess...

officeplant• 5 years ago

old.reddit.com until they finally kill it off, then I'll just stop going.

Spoom• 5 years ago

i.reddit.com actually works quite well on mobile, but I think this has even more risk of being shut down at a moment's notice so try not to mention it too much.

pvillano• 5 years ago

I believe thingiverse is worse

ramphastidae• 5 years ago

Teddit.net

danjac• 5 years ago

I often wonder about the dumpster fire that is the web version of Reddit. Normally I assume incompetence over malice, but - they had a perfectly decent working link aggregator site over a decade ago, and more than sufficent resources and budget to maintain that site and make small improvements to the UX and design over time. So the only conclusion is that this is a planned, prolonged and deliberate act of self-sabotage and vandalism.

taauji• 5 years ago

I think they are trying to facebookifying (for the lack of better word) their interface. The trade off here is that user engagement lost due to bulky js is covered by the increase in user engagement due to flashy web features. user engagement is corporate double speak for user addiction.

krferriter• 4 years ago

The mobile app is terrible too. Even many of the 3rd party apps are not very good, especially on iOS. There are some good ones for Android like Boost and Relay, which I wish I could get on iOS.

It is an embarrassingly bad mobile app and web UI for one of the most popular sites in the world that really grew up natively on the modern web.

pedrogpimenta3• 5 years ago

For a while now, Firefox blocks requests to reddit.com when visiting other websites. I mean, if domain.com sends a request to reddit.com, it gets blocked through the Enhanced Tracking Protection thingie. I know this because I built a front-end for reddit and I have to turn Enhanced Tracking Protection off for the domain.

IiydAbITMvJkqKf• 5 years ago

Oh no, not reddit, the biggest cesspool of the internet!

marttt• 5 years ago

For me, http://teddit.net remained accessible. I had forgotten the address, but dug it out via HN because of the current issue. Great UI; see the ~300 comments on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206

Pxtl4• 5 years ago

Reddit announced the cause of the outage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_block...

PetGorignac, Admin, 2 hr. ago
Hi folks,
I was the incident commander for this one and came by to drop a bit of information about what happened here.
We were attempting to mitigate some problematic traffic that had been causing a low amount of site errors over the past few hours. In doing so, we identified some traffic characteristics that we believed correlated with the error rate and attempted to block it. It turns out this blocked Firefox traffic, which we noticed relatively quickly, leading us to revert the change.
Apologies for the disruption!
(Also kudos to the commentor who had a great RCA, but sadly the comment got deleted before I could respond)

aprdm• 5 years ago

I disabled DNS via HTTPS and it solved the issue.

Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox

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