11 ms·

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

273 points by kzrdude 5y ago

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.

kzrdude 5y ago
Looks like this was active all of 20-25 minutes, and now it's over. :)
danuker 5y 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 5y ago
It appears so: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s3zop9/desktop_site_says_blocked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s3zop9/desktop_site_s...
pabloescobyte 5y 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!
JonahSussman 5y 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.
- sebzim4500 5y 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 5y ago
    It’s so bad half the time I think they have to be trolling their own users.
- function_seven 5y ago
  > I feel like it would get solved almost immediately. Hell, probably wouldn't have even made it to production.
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  Seems a bit of a dramatic take. I think Firefox has a few engineers on staff.
  - jdlshore 5y 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.
    - waffle_maniac 5y ago
      Seems like it was fixed pretty quickly?
- dabluecaboose 5y ago
  The wild west internet of our youths is dying, and these are the death throes.
- tzs 5y 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 5y 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.
    - bill_from_tampa 5y ago
      Concur - pasting copied text is a random nightmare. The markdown editor works fine but the 'help' menu has disappeared. So it goes.
- millzlane 5y 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 5y 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
irrational 5y 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?
c4ss4ndr4 5y 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.
weare138 5y ago
Same here
CyberMuz 5y ago
Yes, me too. What is happening?
Seggan 5y ago
Whew. Thought someone was messing with my compute. Can confirm Firefox only.
anm89 5y ago
Hopefully this will be permanent.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y 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.
  - Pxtl 5y 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.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      On the other hand, I just got on-boarded to a doctor's office system that included a warning (delivered with the on-boarding link by SMS) that the website would "only work on a PC with Firefox or Safari".
      - Pxtl 5y ago
        I've run into a few older sites designed around IE quirks that have stopped working under MS Edge but run great in FF, actually. Sql Server 2012 Reports websites for example. Which makes sense - FF was designed to imitate some IE idiosyncracies that Chrome didn't care about, and Edge/Edgium uses Chrome renderer now.
    - slowmovintarget 5y ago
      This is because FF is enabling better privacy controls, and so many sites these days are designed to run in pants-down mode.
area51org 5y ago
THANK YOU. I thought it was just me. And Chrome works fine! Bizarre.
sup1993 5y ago
Same problem. Its fine on chrome.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Animats 5y ago
Yes, just hit that myself. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/who_else_is_getting_the_403blocked_response_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/who_else_...
- danudey 5y ago
  That thread is from two months ago.
hexagonsun 5y ago
im seeing the same
dreamer_ 5y ago
same here (Poland)
Nasreddin_Hodja 5y ago
#metoo Faking User-Agent header doesn't help.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  This is interesting now. What are some other simple ways of identifying a browser?
  - anticensor 5y ago
    Request patterns
  - BitterAmethyst 5y ago
    There are JS objects you can look for, `window.chrome` for example is present on Chromium browsers but not Firefox.
infinityplus1 5y ago
Anyone tried changing the user agent?
captain_ahabb 5y ago
Interestingly, doing a request from thunder client with firefox as the user agent returns 200 OK...
nullc 5y ago
Alphabet investment in Reddit confirmed. :P
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MMAesawy 5y ago
Getting a 403 on FF, yes.
bvhammersmark 5y ago
good to see this thread, hope this gets fixed.
josalhor 5y 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/hmohtxq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/comment/h...
- cm2187 5y ago
  not for me
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  The post you're referencing is two months old.
  - josalhor 5y ago
    My bad, you're right. I mistook "2m" as 2 minutes ago, not two months.
bvhammersmark 5y ago
good to see I'm not the only one. Chrome and Edge work fine. I hope this gets fixed.
radlad 5y ago
Yes, I see "Blocked"
Bilal_io 5y ago
Same here. Tried to fake the agent to Chrome 87 and was still blocked. Edit: 14:23EST - it's back online for me.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Oooh, so it's not user-agent it's detecting, but something else?
  - Bilal_io 5y 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.
    - Bilal_io 5y ago
      May not be a Firefox issue. Google uses h3 protocol and it works fine. Firefox is back online for Firefix. Everything request from reddit appears to be h2 from both FF and Chromium, I wish I checked earlier when it was still blocked.
Seggan 5y ago
Whew. Thought someone was messing with my computer. Can confirm Firefox only.
stgnet 5y ago
Waterfox is working. Must be something new that FF is doing.
- stgnet 5y ago
  ... and suddenly FF is working again. Somebudy dun goofed.
adl 5y ago
Here is some more info: https://twitter.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1481592266141716482 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_solution_for_firefox_not_working_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2utvv/psa_solutio...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- irrational 5y 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 5y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052
- arsfeld 5y ago
  None of that is working for me, I think it's a different issue.
- politelemon 5y 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 5y ago
old.reddit.com is accessible just fine under 88.
asdff 5y ago
Old reddit still works
- function_seven 5y ago
  Not for me. Getting same "Blocked" message, but only on FF.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Weird, it works for me on FF. 96.0
- neilsimp1 5y ago
  old.reddit.com is showing "Blocked" for me, FF 95.0.2. Edit: Updated to 96.0, and Reddit is back again.
- Alvarito050506 5y ago
  That's what I use, and it isn't working for me.
- rvieira 5y ago
  Not even old reddit works for me.
DaftDank 5y ago
It is for me
bluely 5y 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 5y ago
not for nightly
alana314 5y ago
Guess I'll get some work done
hackingthelema 5y ago
Interestingly, it works just fine in the console/text-based browsers links, elinks, and lynx.
cm2187 5y ago
Can it be related to the http3 downgrade firefox did yesterday?
_eric 5y 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
howdydoo 5y ago
Libreddit still works https://libredd.it/ https://libredd.it/
jasfi 5y 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!
everyone 5y 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.
Alvarito050506 5y ago
It works on Iceweasel 38 :P
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
espadrine 5y 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  Doubt it. I've been accessing Reddit with Firefox v96 without issues for quite some time.
- nanny 5y ago
  I don't think so, my Firefox was requesting with HTTP/2.
awalGarg 5y ago
Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!
- db48x 5y 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
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
c4ss4ndr4 5y 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 5y ago
Happens to me as well.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
everyone 5y 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.
footlose_3815 5y ago
[dead]
krono 5y 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.
- CyberShadow 5y 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.
  - krono 5y ago
    Yes no encoding so unsafe to render, therefore Firefox blocked it. Wasn't implying anything else.
    - CyberShadow 5y ago
      If you saw the word "Blocked", then it did render it.
- sdflhasjd 5y 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.
  - krono 5y 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
89vision 5y ago
Seems to be working for me. Is it only blocked for users that are logged in?
- wongarsu 5y 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?
  - jmholla 5y 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.
- nanny 5y ago
  Nope, it didn't load in incognito mode for me either.
alex4e 5y 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 5y ago
  It’s happening in India too, if it’s any consolation
  - UnseenTraveller 5y ago
smudgy 5y ago
Phew.... Not just me.
mapledipdonut 5y ago
Anyone else have the immediate reaction/thought "oh God, IT has finally caught on and blocked reddit because of me"?
- zer0w1re 5y ago
  I panicked for a few minutes waiting for IT to knock on my office door...
- millzlane 5y ago
  Yep, I was looking at pictures of cannabis flowers the moment it happened.
- bill_from_tampa 5y 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 5y 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.
- elxr 5y ago
  It has already been fixed.
- decrypt 5y 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
snake_plissken 5y 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 5y ago
  Maybe they're detecting some signature in the TLS negotiation?
gamblor956 5y ago
Works fine for me on Firefox...
punk_ihaq 5y ago
Resolved: "Blocked" error when accessing reddit.com on Firefox. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_blocked_error_when_accessing_redditcom/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_block...
diogenesjunior 5y 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 5y ago
They should do this more, I needed the break.
mkl95 5y 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.
- pedrogpimenta 5y ago
  Indeed. It sucks so much I built my own :)
  - brian_herman 5y ago
    Are you the apollo guy?
    - spiderice 5y ago
      That would be iamthatis. Both on Reddit and on here apparently https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamthatis https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamthatis
  - blocked_again 5y 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.
    - ravi-delia 5y ago
      They built a frontend, not a clone
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      The network effect in 2005 was 5 people including a link on their site.
  - moneywoes 5y ago
    Do you think they are going to limit their api like Twitter?
  - 5y ago
pedrogpimenta 5y 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 5y ago
Oh no, not reddit, the biggest cesspool of the internet!
marttt 5y ago
For me, http://teddit.net 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206
Pxtl 5y ago
Reddit announced the cause of the outage. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_blocked_error_when_accessing_redditcom/hso4zl2/ 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 5y ago
I disabled DNS via HTTPS and it solved the issue.
jmholla 5y ago
I just saw the same thing. Guess my productivity is going to skyrocket.
hdb2 5y ago
same exact thing here.
luca616 5y ago
I guess this means I'll actually have to do some work today :(
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
born2discover 5y ago
Just came here to see if I was the only one seeing that. HN never disappoints.
0x7E3 5y ago
It seems to work fine for me. How many is 'many'?
- luca616 5y ago
  What browser? Firefox seems to be the only one affected right now
  - danuker 5y ago
    I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium as well.
  - 0x7E3 5y ago
    Firefox. On desktop.
- decrypt 5y ago
  Loads okay for me too.
rb666 5y ago
Same here, thought it must be me! Related to the earlier http3 issue?
- arprocter 5y ago
  That's what I guessed, but the http3 fix has no effect Changing user-agent doesn't do anything either
  - Sharparam 5y ago
    Spoofing the user-agent to look like Chrome made reddit work for me when using Firefox.
    - arprocter 5y ago
      Weird - perhaps the extension I was using didn't actually work Seems like they've fixed whatever it was now anyhow
      - Sharparam 5y ago
        It seems the User-Agent workaround solved it for some people, but not for others. Definitely weird.
luca616 5y ago
Confirmed Firefox only on my devices
po1nter 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Do HN next (for my productivity).
- anticensor 5y ago
  Different teams.
canadianwriter 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
HTML only says <body><pre>Blocked</pre></body>
yeee 5y ago
blocked here, all other browsers work fine

273 points by kzrdude 5y ago

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.

kzrdude 5y ago

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

danuker 5y 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 5y ago

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

pabloescobyte 5y 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!

JonahSussman 5y 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.

sebzim4500 5y 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 5y ago
  It’s so bad half the time I think they have to be trolling their own users.
function_seven 5y ago
> I feel like it would get solved almost immediately. Hell, probably wouldn't have even made it to production.
waffle_maniac 5y ago
Seems a bit of a dramatic take. I think Firefox has a few engineers on staff.
- jdlshore 5y 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.
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    Seems like it was fixed pretty quickly?
dabluecaboose 5y ago
The wild west internet of our youths is dying, and these are the death throes.
tzs 5y 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 5y 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.
  - bill_from_tampa 5y ago
    Concur - pasting copied text is a random nightmare. The markdown editor works fine but the 'help' menu has disappeared. So it goes.
millzlane 5y 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 5y 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

irrational 5y 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?

c4ss4ndr4 5y 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.

weare138 5y ago

Same here

CyberMuz 5y ago

Yes, me too. What is happening?

Seggan 5y ago

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

anm89 5y ago

Hopefully this will be permanent.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y 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.
- Pxtl 5y 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.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    On the other hand, I just got on-boarded to a doctor's office system that included a warning (delivered with the on-boarding link by SMS) that the website would "only work on a PC with Firefox or Safari".
    - Pxtl 5y ago
      I've run into a few older sites designed around IE quirks that have stopped working under MS Edge but run great in FF, actually. Sql Server 2012 Reports websites for example. Which makes sense - FF was designed to imitate some IE idiosyncracies that Chrome didn't care about, and Edge/Edgium uses Chrome renderer now.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    This is because FF is enabling better privacy controls, and so many sites these days are designed to run in pants-down mode.

area51org 5y ago

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

sup1993 5y ago

Same problem. Its fine on chrome.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Animats 5y ago

Yes, just hit that myself. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/who_else_is_getting_the_403blocked_response_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/who_else_...

danudey 5y ago
That thread is from two months ago.

hexagonsun 5y ago

im seeing the same

dreamer_ 5y ago

same here (Poland)

Nasreddin_Hodja 5y ago

#metoo Faking User-Agent header doesn't help.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
This is interesting now. What are some other simple ways of identifying a browser?
- anticensor 5y ago
  Request patterns
- BitterAmethyst 5y ago
  There are JS objects you can look for, `window.chrome` for example is present on Chromium browsers but not Firefox.

infinityplus1 5y ago

Anyone tried changing the user agent?

captain_ahabb 5y ago

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

nullc 5y ago

Alphabet investment in Reddit confirmed. :P

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

MMAesawy 5y ago

Getting a 403 on FF, yes.

bvhammersmark 5y ago

good to see this thread, hope this gets fixed.

josalhor 5y 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/hmohtxq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/r55zax/comment/h...

cm2187 5y ago
not for me
Bilal_io 5y ago
The post you're referencing is two months old.
- josalhor 5y ago
  My bad, you're right. I mistook "2m" as 2 minutes ago, not two months.

bvhammersmark 5y ago

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

radlad 5y ago

Yes, I see "Blocked"

Bilal_io 5y ago

Same here. Tried to fake the agent to Chrome 87 and was still blocked. Edit: 14:23EST - it's back online for me.

Pxtl 5y ago
Oooh, so it's not user-agent it's detecting, but something else?
- Bilal_io 5y 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.
  - Bilal_io 5y ago
    May not be a Firefox issue. Google uses h3 protocol and it works fine. Firefox is back online for Firefix. Everything request from reddit appears to be h2 from both FF and Chromium, I wish I checked earlier when it was still blocked.

Seggan 5y ago

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

stgnet 5y ago

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

stgnet 5y ago
... and suddenly FF is working again. Somebudy dun goofed.

adl 5y ago

Here is some more info: https://twitter.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1481592266141716482 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_solution_for_firefox_not_working_right_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2utvv/psa_solutio...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
irrational 5y 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 5y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918052
arsfeld 5y ago
None of that is working for me, I think it's a different issue.
politelemon 5y 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 5y ago

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

asdff 5y ago

Old reddit still works

function_seven 5y ago
Not for me. Getting same "Blocked" message, but only on FF.
- asdff 5y ago
  Weird, it works for me on FF. 96.0
neilsimp1 5y ago
old.reddit.com is showing "Blocked" for me, FF 95.0.2. Edit: Updated to 96.0, and Reddit is back again.
Alvarito050506 5y ago
That's what I use, and it isn't working for me.
rvieira 5y ago
Not even old reddit works for me.

DaftDank 5y ago

It is for me

bluely 5y 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 5y ago

not for nightly

alana314 5y ago

Guess I'll get some work done

hackingthelema 5y ago

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

cm2187 5y ago

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

_eric 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

howdydoo 5y ago

Libreddit still works https://libredd.it/ https://libredd.it/

jasfi 5y 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!

everyone 5y 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.

Alvarito050506 5y ago

It works on Iceweasel 38 :P

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

espadrine 5y 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Doubt it. I've been accessing Reddit with Firefox v96 without issues for quite some time.
nanny 5y ago
I don't think so, my Firefox was requesting with HTTP/2.

awalGarg 5y ago

Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!

db48x 5y 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
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

c4ss4ndr4 5y 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 5y ago

Happens to me as well.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

everyone 5y 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.

footlose_3815 5y ago

[dead]

krono 5y 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.

CyberShadow 5y 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.
- krono 5y ago
  Yes no encoding so unsafe to render, therefore Firefox blocked it. Wasn't implying anything else.
  - CyberShadow 5y ago
    If you saw the word "Blocked", then it did render it.
sdflhasjd 5y 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.
- krono 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

89vision 5y ago

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

wongarsu 5y 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?
- jmholla 5y 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.
nanny 5y ago
Nope, it didn't load in incognito mode for me either.

alex4e 5y 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 5y ago
It’s happening in India too, if it’s any consolation
- UnseenTraveller 5y ago

smudgy 5y ago

Phew.... Not just me.

mapledipdonut 5y ago

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

zer0w1re 5y ago
I panicked for a few minutes waiting for IT to knock on my office door...
millzlane 5y ago
Yep, I was looking at pictures of cannabis flowers the moment it happened.
bill_from_tampa 5y 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 5y 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.

elxr 5y ago
It has already been fixed.
decrypt 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

snake_plissken 5y 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 5y ago
Maybe they're detecting some signature in the TLS negotiation?

gamblor956 5y ago

Works fine for me on Firefox...

punk_ihaq 5y ago

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

diogenesjunior 5y 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 5y ago

They should do this more, I needed the break.

mkl95 5y 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.

pedrogpimenta 5y ago
Indeed. It sucks so much I built my own :)
- brian_herman 5y ago
  Are you the apollo guy?
  - spiderice 5y ago
    That would be iamthatis. Both on Reddit and on here apparently https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamthatis https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamthatis
- blocked_again 5y 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.
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    They built a frontend, not a clone
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The network effect in 2005 was 5 people including a link on their site.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  Do you think they are going to limit their api like Twitter?
- 5y ago

pedrogpimenta 5y 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 5y ago

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

marttt 5y ago

For me, http://teddit.net 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206

Pxtl 5y ago

Reddit announced the cause of the outage. https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_blocked_error_when_accessing_redditcom/hso4zl2/ 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 5y ago

I disabled DNS via HTTPS and it solved the issue.

jmholla 5y ago

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

hdb2 5y ago

same exact thing here.

luca616 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

born2discover 5y ago

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

0x7E3 5y ago

It seems to work fine for me. How many is 'many'?

luca616 5y ago
What browser? Firefox seems to be the only one affected right now
- danuker 5y ago
  I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium as well.
- 0x7E3 5y ago
  Firefox. On desktop.
decrypt 5y ago
Loads okay for me too.

rb666 5y ago

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

arprocter 5y ago
That's what I guessed, but the http3 fix has no effect Changing user-agent doesn't do anything either
- Sharparam 5y ago
  Spoofing the user-agent to look like Chrome made reddit work for me when using Firefox.
  - arprocter 5y ago
    Weird - perhaps the extension I was using didn't actually work Seems like they've fixed whatever it was now anyhow
    - Sharparam 5y ago
      It seems the User-Agent workaround solved it for some people, but not for others. Definitely weird.

luca616 5y ago

Confirmed Firefox only on my devices

po1nter 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

Do HN next (for my productivity).

anticensor 5y ago
Different teams.

canadianwriter 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

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

yeee 5y ago

blocked here, all other browsers work fine