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This is an information post detailing my experiences.
Recently, I have been blocked from a seemingly random collection of websites, one which includes a financial site I use for work.
I tested using VPNs, taking my mobile off wireless, and other devices, and initially it looked like a DNS issue.
After all, the site worked over VPN, worked over 4G, did not work on any device that was wireless or wired to to the router, and looked like it was timing out.
However, this is only because I had a small sample size, here is a (by no means complete) list of sites that were affected:
https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/
https://www.timberland.com/homepage.html
While cmegroup just times out, all the rest give a
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.ae.com/" on this server.
Reference #18.f674d68.1647362458.75edbd0
type error message. This is a good indication that your IP is on an Akamai blacklist.
What to do?
At this point, you have two options. First, go to https://www.akamai.com/us/en/clientrep-lookup/, an Akamai website that won't block you, and see if your IP is listed as a bad actor. If so, you can now either try to petition Akamai to remove your IP from the support link on that webpage, or ask Verizon to change your IP. Keep in mind that technically, if your IP is listed as having a bad risk score, this is not Verizon's fault. Rather, websites that use Akamai to protect themselves have automatically detected your IP trying to do shady things to them. You may see things like "web scraper" and the like. If you firmly believe that you have not been doing anything shady and know exactly what is going on your network, it is recommended to ask Akamai to remove you. If, however, you are unsure of your network or innocence, it is better to ask Verizon to change your IP. Make sure they do more than reset the ONT box, as even on DHCP, your machine may cling to the same IP after the router/ONT box reboots. Eventually, DHCP will change your IP automatically anyway (perhaps after a month), so the problem can also resolve itself naturally. If you find yourself repeatedly running into this problem over the course of several weeks, this might be a sign that your network is compromised in some fashion.
Specific cases:
As for me, it turns out one of the programs I was using, SoftEther VPN Client, was flagging my IP as a malicious actor. If you use this program, open up the Client Manager, go to Tools -> Switch Operation Mode, and click VPN Gate Service Settings. Unmark the checkbox that says "Enable the VPN Gate Relay Service and Join the VPN Gate Research as a Volunteer." This should let Akamai not view you as a web scraping bot.