CDN backed by R2: connection reset errors for some IPs in East Africa

Application Performance CDN
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We use the Cloudflare CDN backed by content hosted on R2. For months now we have had reports of intermittent “connection reset” errors when trying to download content by users in East Africa, in particular Tanzania and Uganda.

Setup and technical details

Example URL: https://media.tanzlii.org/media/judgment/373685/source_file/339010aaaf78e3ad/COMMERCIAL_CASE_NO._000030499_OF_2024_BOT_AND_GALILEA_RULING1.pdf

The DNS for the domain media.tanzlii.org is managed by Cloudflare and is backed by an R2 bucket.

The request succeeds from some networks in Tanzania, and succeeds 100% of the time from networks outside the country (eg. South Africa).

Error details

At least some of these errors are coming from IPs in the subnet 197.250.0.0/16.

Traceroute

tracert media.tanzlii.org
 
Tracing route to media.tanzlii.org [104.21.64.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
 
  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.20.124
  2     3 ms     4 ms     2 ms  197.250.15.125
  3     5 ms     7 ms     9 ms  41.217.202.238
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    53 ms    59 ms    57 ms  105.255.5.54
  6    53 ms    53 ms    53 ms  197.234.240.23
  7    66 ms    63 ms    65 ms  104.21.64.1
 
Trace complete.

Curl

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Browser

A browser request either shows connection failed or timed out.