CloudFlare Throttling Issue (FTTH)

[andyxl987]

I have EE's Full Fibre package and hadn't had any problems in about 10 months of service. However, for the last 24 hours (maybe longer) I am experiencing extremely slow speeds to certain sites. For example, loading a discord channel may take 4 minutes to load. The emoji panel makes dozens of requests in a short frequency and also fails to load correctly.

I do not experience this issue while connected to a VPN.

I experienced something similar on Friday using 5G (also with discord) but put that down to signal issues.

Discord is not the only site that is affected. I host some public services on a remote server (Germany) and use CloudFlare proxy in front of these. Speed issues are also apparent for these, which again, do not reproduce when using a VPN. In fact, if I edit /etc/hosts to bypass CloudFlare's proxy, everything loads instantly. Note, that Discord also uses CloudFlare.

While it's possible the issue is my end, e.g. my router, Friday's issue while on mobile has me wondering if there's some issue between EE and CloudFlare? There appears to be severe throttling where the first several requests are fine and any subsequent requests are exponentially slower to send/receive.

I've also encountered similar while pulling images from docker hub and github container registry (although I do not believe either use CloudFlare).

[Akiyama8641]

Yep, this basically sums up my experience as well. This is the third time this is happening. It appeared once, then went away. Then came back a second time (which is when this thread was created), then went away for a month, and now we're here.

Customer support is completely useless as, as you say, they seem to have no idea what you're talking about. I can't even get them to forward it to their tech team or whatever.

As of right now, the only real solution is to use a VPN when doing any major interaction with Cloudflare hosted services until the issue magically fixes itself again. Luckily, things like Discord still generally work without one, but the experience when using them is severely degraded.

[PodRED]

Similarly having issues with cloudflare hosted sites and services. Seems pretty clear that it's across all of EE. 

However I'd wager this is an issue on Cloudflare's end, akin to the incorrect blocking they were doing for everyone on Discord last week, rather than an issue at EE's end. 

Frustratingly it seems to be impossible to get hold of anybody who can resolve this so I have to use a VPN for anything with Cloudflare. 

[nh610]

Been suffering from this issue for a few weeks (months?) now - incredibly frustrating.

Might have just been a temporary coincidence but turning off QUIC in Edge seemed to fix this for me when I last had the problem - to do so go to chrome://flags/ search for QUIC and disable.

[Akiyama8641]

@PodRED If that's the case, then they should get their act together; this is the third time.

@nh610 Just tried this myself and it made no noticeable difference (Chrome).

[nh610]

@Akiyama8641 yeah in hindsight I think it was a coincidence as just had the issue again 😕

[bobpullen]

Might it be useful to get those experiencing problems to try tracing to a Cloudflare host to see if there's any commonality in the routing? Similar to what was provided in the post here.

[andyxl987]

I've created a post in the Cloudflare Community Forum, maybe nothing will come from it, but it can't hurt: Packet Loss affecting EE Customers (UK ISP) - Website, Application, Performance / DNS & Network - Cl...

[Heaving0551]

Does anyone with the ability to actually look into this use the forums?

ubuntu (192.168.2.17) -> discord.com (162.159.128.233) 2023-10-07T16:08:09+0000
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                       Packets               Pings
 Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. OPNsense.localdomain              0.0%    49    0.4   0.4   0.3   0.5   0.0
 2. 172.16.11.100                     0.0%    49    1.8   1.8   1.5   2.3   0.2
 3. 213.121.98.145                   89.4%    48    6.8   6.8   6.7   7.0   0.1
 4. 213.121.98.144                    0.0%    48    6.2   7.5   5.7  45.4   5.7
 5. 87.237.20.134                     0.0%    48    6.9   7.5   6.9  12.8   1.4
 6. 87.237.21.10                     27.1%    48    7.9  11.1   7.2  23.6   3.6
 7. 172.70.94.4                       0.0%    48    7.9   8.7   7.0  30.9   3.7
 8. 162.159.128.233                   8.3%    48    7.5   7.6   7.0   8.4   0.2

[XRaySpeX]

@Heaving0551 : Yes, your peer users attending this forum would be more qualified to look at this than EE staff!

[tofuy]

Been Having This Issue Also, extra bad in the past week making anything cloudflare related completely unusable 

Please someone at EE with braincells look at this issue and figure it out I beg