I’m just an average user who’s been using Cloudflare’s DNS via my router for years now. About a month ago, I found that during certain parts of the day, some websites that I frequent started having major performance/slowdown issues. This seems to happen around specific times during the day. During an average weekday, the problem typically starts occuring around 4pm CDT. During a weekend or Holiday, it starts first thing in the morning, and lasts all day. However, every single night the problem goes away around 1am.
I spent weeks troubleshooting with my ISP, and so far they can’t figure out what’s going on. I eventually came across a reddit post from a few months back made by someone who was experiencing something similar. So, like them, I ran a program called DNS Benchmark. I ran it multiple times, and when the problem is happening, the benchmark always came back showing Cloudflare as being the only DNS that was less than 100% reliable. However, during the times the problem isn’t happening, the benchmark showed Cloudflare as 100% reliable.
So I changed my DNS to Google, and while the benchmark is showing 100% reliability with them, the problem is still happening. I then used a website to check if certain sites are using Cloudflare. Every site that I frequent that has starting having this problem in the past month uses Cloudflare’s DNS and Cloudflare CDN/Proxy.
I don’t know who to contact or where to go in order to get this resolved. If it would be of any use, I live in D’Iberville Mississippi and my ISP is Sparklight.
1 Like
My apologies, but upon further testing, the problem doesn’t seem to be due to Cloudflare’s DNS, but a problem with the web service in general.
The ISP technician I spoke to recommended I use a program called WinMTR that runs a pretty thorough traceroute for each website tested, and he said to identify the IP Addresses that show problems. When the problem occurs, Cloudflare IP Addresses along the route start to suffer from significant packet loss.
I don’t know if a mod could redirect this to the proper forum, any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
1 Like
This is a problem I’ve been experiencing since late August. During certain hours of the day, a portion of the sites I frequent would become significantly slower to browse, while the rest of the web remains perfectly fine. I live on the MS Gulf Coast, and on an average weekday, the problem starts happening at around 4pm CDT. On a weekend, holiday (such as Labor Day), or even an occasional Friday, the problem starts first thing in the morning and lasts all day. And every night the problem always goes away at around 1am.
I spent weeks troubleshooting with my ISP, but they assure me my connection is great and there’s nothing wrong on their end. Eventually a tech I spoke to suggested I run a traceroute using a program called WinMTR, and use a site that identifies IP Addresses in order to see where the problem along the route could be coming from.
Apparently the common link between the sites affected by this is that they use Cloudflare, even their DNS is affected.
During the hours the problem is occurring, the traceroute almost immediately shows significant packet loss coming from Cloudflare IP Addresses along the route. During the hours the problem isn’t occurring, the packet loss is gone.
The average test with WinMTR never shows any problem with my ISP’s addresses, but once it reaches outside of that, the sites affected typically show three Cloudflare IP Addresses: two out of Dallas, and one out of San Francisco. Sometimes it would show a few “No response from host” messages among them, and rarely one or two Level 3 addresses out of Dallas would show up among the Cloudflare ones, also showing packet loss.
This has been incredibly frustrating to deal with, and it seems like there’s no end in sight. What could be the cause of this, and why has it lasted for so long?
1 Like
I’ve been having the same issue here for about a month or more.
I’m in Gulfport, MS with Sparklight as well and I’m getting routed to Dallas Cloudflare servers too. I get about 15-20% packet loss. I ran traceroutes and as soon as it hits Cloudflare it starts dropping. No problems with any over servers.
I’ll use that WinMTR and check here soon. This morning I had zero drops until about 3-4pm CST then it just started getting worse and worse until it got to that normal 15-20% loss. This is an every day thing for me, not just weekends/holidays.
I’m at a loss of what to do as well.
1 Like
Thank you! The last Sparklight tech I spoke to mentioned other people in the area were having similar issues, so it’s clearly a widespread problem. Hopefully this finally gets noticed and fixed.