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

273 points by kzrdude ↗ HN
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.

179 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread
jmholla
I just saw the same thing. Guess my productivity is going to skyrocket.
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born2discover
Just came here to see if I was the only one seeing that. HN never disappoints.
0x7E3
It seems to work fine for me.

How many is 'many'?

luca616
What browser? Firefox seems to be the only one affected right now
danuker
I get "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" with Chromium as well.
0x7E3
Firefox. On desktop.
hdb2
same exact thing here.
luca616
I guess this means I'll actually have to do some work today :(
rb666
Same here, thought it must be me! Related to the earlier http3 issue?
arprocter
That's what I guessed, but the http3 fix has no effect

Changing user-agent doesn't do anything either

Sharparam
Spoofing the user-agent to look like Chrome made reddit work for me when using Firefox.
arprocter
Weird - perhaps the extension I was using didn't actually work

Seems like they've fixed whatever it was now anyhow

Sharparam
It seems the User-Agent workaround solved it for some people, but not for others. Definitely weird.
luca616
Confirmed Firefox only on my devices
po1nter
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
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
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
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.
canadianwriter
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
Their status page had rising error rates and a big voting backlog spike for some time before I hit the 403 issue personally.
niszhant
HTML only says <body><pre>Blocked</pre></body>
yeee
blocked here, all other browsers work fine
anm89
Hopefully this will be permanent.
danuker
No more Reddit procrastination for me I guess. I hope so too.
A4ET8a8uTh0
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
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
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
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
This is because FF is enabling better privacy controls, and so many sites these days are designed to run in pants-down mode.
nomorecommas
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.
area51org
THANK YOU. I thought it was just me. And Chrome works fine! Bizarre.
sup1993
Same problem. Its fine on chrome.
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pabloescobyte
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!

Nasreddin_Hodja
#metoo

Faking User-Agent header doesn't help.

A4ET8a8uTh0
This is interesting now. What are some other simple ways of identifying a browser?
BitterAmethyst
There are JS objects you can look for, `window.chrome` for example is present on Chromium browsers but not Firefox.
captain_ahabb
Interestingly, doing a request from thunder client with firefox as the user agent returns 200 OK...