Verizon Has Been Blocking Various Websites, And Nobody Knows Why
When it comes to internet providers, Verizon Fios is one of the faster, more reliable options, especially in the northeast part of the United States where it is only offered at the time of this writing. However, in the past few months, some users online have started to say that certain websites aren’t able to be accessed when using either a Verizon Fios connection or even a Verizon mobile data connection. The websites in question in question will always come back as timed out, making it unaware to the user that the website is blocked rather than just down for maintenance.
This has started to be brought up thanks to a Reddit thread on CrackWatch, a subreddit dedicated to sharing news of the latest cracks on games (Note: We at Gamers Gospel do NOT endorse piracy, nor will we ever, we strive to provide honesty in our sources and report factual information. Our research has shown that the subreddit does not allow for the direct linking of pirated games, hence why we are sourcing it.). One of the said websites mentioned has been blocked by Verizon, and yet there is no problem accessing it from other ISP’s in North America. Various users in the thread have stated that they didn’t even know the websites were blocked and figured they were just down.
After further research, it seems that the issue lies with DDoS-guard, a web host based in Russia that is known for hosting various darknet and far-right websites that we will not list here, but there is a fantastic article from Meduza that I highly recommend that you read as it is incredibly well researched and gives an explanation about the controversy behind the web host that could possibly be the reason that it started getting blocked by Verizon in the first place. These issues have been reportedly going on for the last few months and the number of websites getting blocked by Verizon has been growing slowly since then.
It can be assumed that Verizon has started blocking these websites using DDoS-guard due to their various links with said far-right websites, as they have shown to also have links with the January 6th attack on the Capitol of the United States. While they have also been shown to be linked to other kinds of websites, this is the only viable reason as to why they would block an entire web host rather than just individual websites, after all, it is a common problem for ISP’s to block a website if it’s linked to certain illegal activity but the ones that are blocked are typically linked to piracy, not an entire web host.
We have reached out to Verizon and are currently waiting for a response, we will update the article when they respond.
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