Twitter blocked?

[f1assistance]

Any reason twitter.com would in the last 24 hrs. be blocked as an Anonymizer site?

[sky-knight]

Not blocked for me...

[f1assistance]

I had to temporarily add the site to the pass list to get it to not display the block. I just removed the site from the pass list and it seems okay now. Interesting...

[jcoehoorn]

It was blocked here, too, as part of the anonymizer category.

If I had to guess, I'd say that twitter uses a cloud service... Amazon EC2 or the like... as part of their system. Somewhere late last week I bet they ended up with new cloud instances and new IP addresses. This could also be related to the outage they had last week, possibly as part of fixing it, or possibly both this the outage were dependant on a separate incident (such as simply adding capacity).

The point is that my guess is the new IP Addresses took over for an old rage that used to be held by an anonymizer service. Of course, that's only a guess and likely way off.

Regardless of how it happens, it's now fun when your helpdesk gets a call from the College President wondering why you're blocking his twitter feed.

[sky-knight]

The wonders of a dynamic filtration service.

With the filter being DNS based, you could get a bad block and have it fixed within a few minutes but have it take several hours to ditch the locally cached details.