Weird problem accessing website

[DougRees]

I am running Windows 7 (Ultimate) on my "desktop replacement" notebook. Yesterday I found myself unable to access a website I have been working on (http://mybutt-ons.com). Despite the name, it's not a porno site--they sell patches. My Internet was working fine for everything else, and other people I contacted (including at least one who has the same ISP as myself) were able to access the site with no problem. My computer just wouldn't go there (!*#%), but I was able to access the site through a proxy site. I tried five different browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari), and none of them worked. I also tried typing in the IP# rather than the domain name, but that didn't work, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a DNS problem. I also tried disabling my firewall and AV, and that didn't help either. Thinking that it might be some kind of weird paternalistic "parental control", I googled "MILF", and went to some of the sites. They all worked fine. Of course, I tried rebooting my computer, the modem, and the router (a linksys), and even tried to access the site in my virtual machine running XP. Absolutely nothing worked. I contacted the web host (Godaddy), and my ISP (AT&T), and basically got a big fat zero at both places. About five hours later, I tried again, and was able to go to the site with no problem. It's still working, but I have absolutely no clue as to what caused the problem--or what fixed it.

I've been working with computers for about 30 years, and thought I've seen almost everything. But this has me completely baffled. Any ideas?

 

[Dstoop]

Sounds like a routing problem that was completely out of your hands. Somewhere between your house, your ISPs servers, The Grand Internet Backbone, and the server hosting that website a router picked up your request and just sort of shrugged it's shoulders as to where it was supposed to go.

Could've been caused by any number of things. That specific router may have been damaged, failed, or down for maintenance without a failover device properly configured. Some network engineer out there might have borked a router config and it took a few hours to recognize and fix. Odds are you couldn't get to a whole bunch of other websites too, but since you weren't trying to go there you just didnt notice. I ran into exactly this at work a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy. All the routing tables on the great wide internet said the path of least resistance from our office to one of our key business websites ran through a single router somewhere in NYC. For whatever reason that router was taken offline, probably due to storm cleanup, and there was no viable failover option so like you, our connection just... didnt go anywhere. A few hours later the device was back up and running, and our connections went through just fine.

Since it's been resolved, running network diagnostics wouldn't tell us anything. Unfortunately while the internet and routing protocols are designed with redundancy in mind, it's not perfect.

 

[DougRees]

Thank you very much for clearing up what was an incredible mystery. It was extremely frustrating to hear the guy at Godaddy tell me I wasn't typing the address correctly, and to hear the guy at AT&T try to sell me a tech support package for "less than 50 cents a day". I'm glad the mess was finally cleared up, because my customer wanted the work done by today (in time for a trade show), and didn't want any excuses.