I had a new EE fibre broadband installed Friday 5th January to replace my existing BT Broadband service and it has started blocking websites randomly and also preventing images being sent in Whatsapp. This is causing a lot of aggravation as we ca't order from Amazon for example. I am sure it's the EE SmartHub because if you do a factory reset everything starts working again for an hour or so. Also if you use data on your phone or connect the desktop/laptop to your phone's hot spot everything works fine so it's definitely the EE Wifi/Broadband. Other things such as email transfer still work and some website e.g. bbc.co.uk don't get blocked
We get two types of error message:
- A turquoise html page with EE log and URL “block.ee.co.uk and the text
“Access to this website has been blocked. The account holder has chosen to block access for this device. - Alternatively, or on retrying, a message saying
”Safari can't open the page "https://www.google.co.uk” because Safari can't establish a secure connection to the server www.google.co.uk"
Chrome on Mac and Microsoft Edge on Windows have the same issue although slightly different wording but same message. Web sites blocked include:
Lastly if you try to send an image on WhatsApp e.g. a photo it doesn't work and when you try to receive one you get the error: "Couldn't download image. Try again. If the problem keeps happening, try turning off Wi-Fi or VPN, or connecting to a different Wi-Fi network."
Everything worked fine with the new service until we got a email on the 10th Jan saying we had switched off Web Protect. We hadn't but it sounded a good idea to have it on so we installed the app on the phone and connected it to the SmartHub (it said it did a short update in the SmartHub) as many other people have reported the app is useless and sends you on a loop from yeti app to the internet site, where it tells you that you need to use the app to manage Web Protect. Somehow we ended up with Web protect showing on and that's when the above issues started. We called EE support who said we should try turning it off but we couldn't get the app to do that and they said they couldn't do it remotely and logged a call with the technical team.
I called the next day as there had been no change and no feedback and the "Guide" did a factory reset which cleared things for a while but the error came back. At the same time I did manage to see in the app that WebProtect was off now, but within an hour or so the sites were blocked again. I have reset the route 3 times myself from the admin interface and it works briefly but the error comes back in an hour or so. We need EE to investigate and switch off the blocking asap because we can't do half the things we normally do online.
