Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox
Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox
213 points by kzrdude 39 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 119 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
>
I feel like it would get solved almost immediately.Hell, probably wouldn't have even made it to production.
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.
> 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.
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.
Seems a bit of a dramatic take. I think Firefox has a few engineers on staff.
The wild west internet of our youths is dying, and these are the death throes.
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
Doubt it. I've been accessing Reddit with Firefox v96 without issues for quite some time.
I don't think so, my Firefox was requesting with HTTP/2.
Same here. Tried to fake the agent to Chrome 87 and was still blocked.
Edit: 14:23EST - it's back online for me.
Oooh, so it's not user-agent it's detecting, but something else?
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.
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.
Anyone else have the immediate reaction/thought "oh God, IT has finally caught on and blocked reddit because of me"?
Just came here to see if I was the only one seeing that. HN never disappoints.
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.
Their status page had rising error rates and a big voting backlog spike for some time before I hit the 403 issue personally.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems to be working for me. Is it only blocked for users that are logged in?
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?
It's back up now. I was hitting it a few minutes ago. Some reddit engineer must've seen Hacker News or uses Firefox.
Nope, it didn't load in incognito mode for me either.
Interestingly, it works just fine in the console/text-based browsers links, elinks, and lynx.
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.
No more Reddit procrastination for me I guess. I hope so too.
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.
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.
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.
I guess this means I'll actually have to do some work today :(
Same for me (Ukraine) on both Firefox on Windows and Android. Firefox Focus on Android works fine, though. As well as Chrome, Edge, etc.
It’s happening in India too, if it’s any consolation
This is interesting now. What are some other simple ways of identifying a browser?
There are JS objects you can look for, `window.chrome` for example is present on Chromium browsers but not Firefox.
Looks like this was active all of 20-25 minutes, and now it's over. :)
Does reddit use cloudflare? I’m "blocked" on at least some cloudflare sites as well (with Firefox) - Chromium works fine.
Not for me. Getting same "Blocked" message, but only on FF.
old.reddit.com is showing "Blocked" for me, FF 95.0.2.
Edit: Updated to 96.0, and Reddit is back again.
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
> 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.
None of that is working for me, I think it's a different issue.
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.
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.
The post you're referencing is two months old.
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!
Interestingly, doing a request from thunder client with firefox as the user agent returns 200 OK...
Looks like FireFox is actually blocking Reddit rather than the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
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
Can it be related to the http3 downgrade firefox did yesterday?
Waterfox is working. Must be something new that FF is doing.
... and suddenly FF is working again. Somebudy dun goofed.
HTML only says <body><pre>Blocked</pre></body>
THANK YOU. I thought it was just me. And Chrome works fine! Bizarre.
Same here, thought it must be me! Related to the earlier http3 issue?
That's what I guessed, but the http3 fix has no effect
Changing user-agent doesn't do anything either
Spoofing the user-agent to look like Chrome made reddit work for me when using Firefox.
I just saw the same thing. Guess my productivity is going to skyrocket.
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.
Whew. Thought someone was messing with my compute. Can confirm Firefox only.
Whew. Thought someone was messing with my computer. Can confirm Firefox only.
It seems to work fine for me.
How many is 'many'?
What browser? Firefox seems to be the only one affected right now
I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium as well.
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
old.reddit.com is accessible just fine under 88.
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.
good to see I'm not the only one. Chrome and Edge work fine. I hope this gets fixed.
Alphabet investment in Reddit confirmed.
Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!
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
blocked here, all other browsers work fine
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