All of My Websites Were BLOCKED by my ISP!
How an ISP IP-block targeting Cloudflare took down all my websites, and how I worked around it using a Vercel reverse proxy.
WE is either dealing with a massive bug or straight up playing dumb
The Problem
All of my websites have been down for the past 4 days.
They load fine for a friend of mine, but won't open on my end.
They work normally over a VPN and load smoothly from a VPS in Germany, but locally from my network? Absolutely not.
Naturally, I thought the problem was on my machine, until another friend told me today that my site was down for him too.
The Common Denominator
What do we have in common? We’re both subscribed to WE, and we’re both in Ismailia 🫠
Technical Investigation
So, let's spin up an agent and have it dig into this.
Ran a traceroute and found that the site resolves to 3 Cloudflare IPs. Two of them get dropped right at the 3rd hop—literally right past the router, straight on WE's network!
Root Cause: IP Blocking by "WE"
A quick search revealed that this is a known issue: WE blocks the IPs of a handful of sites they don't like (no clue which ones).
Because Cloudflare relies on Anycast IPs (meaning multiple sites/servers share the exact same IP for their CDN), when you block one target site, you end up blocking a ton of innocent sites right along with it!
Including sites that haven't even launched yet!!!
Imagine buying a brand-new domain only to discover that your website won't even open in Egypt simply because you hosted it on Cloudflare (leaving you running in circles for two or three days just to realize the fault was on WE all along).
The real irony here is that Vercel—whose founder literally shook hands with "he-who-must-not-be-named"... doesn't have a single blocked IP.
The Workaround
So what's the fix? Use Vercel as a reverse proxy 🫠
Keep the domain on Vercel, and let it route traffic back to your Cloudflare worker.
May God grant us patience.