Cannot connect to Google or other Google products but can ping to the sites

[robbychen]

Hi,

I discovered this issue yesterday morning when I tried to search for something on Google and displayed "Can't connect" message. Gmail and other websites have been working fine except google.com. I tried restarting my router and it worked fine for a few moments. After that, google.com worked fine but it was Google Photos that cannot connect to. I tried restarting my router one more time, this time was YouTube that was not working correctly (all of the video thumbnails were not shown). I tried to restart the router one last time, and it went back to google.com not working.

I tried ping google.com in the command line and it pinged successfully. However, I cannot connect to the site in the browser. Neither on Windows 10, nor on Mac, nor on iPhone (that's all the devices I own). I also tested on different browsers, the results were the same.

Can someone help me solve this issue, and why does it only affect Google-owned sites?

Thanks,

Robby

[Manipul2020]

I am having the same issue. Verizon appears to be having some sort of DNS issue. I noticed it wasn't resolving caching sites for YouTube thumbnails, but it also intermittently affected other websites where I couldn't connect. Resetting the router fixed the issue temporarily, but it would always return. Also releasing/renewing IPv6 address also fixed the problem temporarily. This is not a router/local network/local device issue. 

It seemed like they just performed a reset at my place without any sort of request (router reset and STBs lost all connection). I will let you know if that fixes it. 

--Edit--

After posting about the reset I had the same issue and couldn't connect back to this site.

[Edg1]

There might be an issue with your local  Verizon DNS server. Login to your router and change the DNS to Google’s and see if that helps. 

[Manipul2020]

I had a tech reset my ONT by contacting support and that seems to have fixed the issue I was seeing. I will report back if that didn't fix the problem. 

[Manipul2020]

The issue is persisting even after ONT reset. 

[Edg1]

Try the DNS change and see if that helps. They are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. 

[Manipul2020]

I have tried multiple DNS servers and it's the same issue. Different sites will all of a sudden fail to resolve even after router/DHCP/ONT reset. Everything else will function as normal.

After my latest chat with support I was told to replace the router, even though I have a hard time believing an intermittent issue like this is due to the router. 

[robbychen]

Hi all,

Thanks for your replies. I seem to solved the issue, at least for the Google part. After I read this article (https://chrisbenard.net/2014/02/25/how-to-fix-verizon-fios-problem-connecting-to-websites/), I manually set the MTU for the router to 1500. The default value is automatic. 

Like Manipul2020 mentioned, I also could not visit this forum after that change. I had to do a manual DHCP release in order to visit here.

I just purchased this router directly from Verizon two months ago. So there shouldn't be any problem with the router.

I will report here if there are more problems.

Robby

[robbychen]

UPDATE: Changing MTU doesn't solve the Google issue at all. I tried different MTU value, from 100 to 1500. I still couldn't visit Google and Google-owned sites.

I got frustrated and reset the router to factory default. It worked for one night. But now, I can't visit google.com and gmail.com. I can't even ping to these sites:

ping gmail.com
Ping request could not find host gmail.com. Please check the name and try again.

ping google.com
Ping request could not find host google.com. Please check the name and try again.

ping bing.com

Pinging bing.com [204.79.197.200] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 204.79.197.200: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=117
Reply from 204.79.197.200: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=117
Reply from 204.79.197.200: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=117
Reply from 204.79.197.200: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=117

Ping statistics for 204.79.197.200:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 15ms, Average = 11ms

 As the above code shows, I can ping to other sites such as bing.com and not these two sites.

Interestingly, only google.com and gmail.com are affected, YouTube and Google Photos are not. As for YouTube, the thumbnails are working correctly, albeit a little slow to show up.

Although right now I can access Gmail through IMAP, it still is a problem as I'm using Google Alerts and Google Alerts need to go through google.com to redirect to the actual site.

I hope this issue will be fixed soon. For the time being, I can use my mobile connection to visit the mentioned sites.

[Manipul2020]

It's almost certainly affecting other addresses as well, but you just not trying them. Your issue sounds exactly like mine and it seemed to have happened at the exact same time. 

Are you in MA by any chance?