Hi everyone,
I am experiencing a severe routing issue on my EE Home Broadband connection that is intermittently (sometimes totally) blocking access to dashboard.render.com (and associated hosted applications).
As a SaaS business owner who hosts my infrastructure on Render, this routing failure has entirely broken my development workflow and access to my live platform. I have just lost a full business day troubleshooting this infrastructure issue instead of driving actual value for my business, which has been incredibly frustrating.
I have performed extensive differential testing and isolated the issue entirely to the EE/BT core routing network.
The Problem
Any TCP connection over Port 443 (HTTPS) to Render's IP block (216.24.57.x) times out completely on EE Home Broadband.
Diagnostics & Cross-Carrier Testing
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EE Home Broadband: 100% failure rate. Test-NetConnection on port 443 fails with a TCP timeout.
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EE Mobile Hotspot: Degraded/Intermittent. It resolves via a NAT64 gateway (64:ff9b::), fails on the primary target, but occasionally succeeds on a fallback IP.
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Vodafone Mobile Hotspot: 100% success rate. Instantly connects to the destination on port 443.
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Local Settings: I have completely turned off EE Web Protection, Content Lock, and Parental Controls. This is not a local firewall or software block.
Traceroute Evidence (The Smoking Gun)
A tracert from my EE Home Broadband connection shows that traffic traverses the BT core network perfectly fine until it hits the Global Internet Access (GIA) edge network, where it dies immediately at hop 8 (166-49-135-83.gia.bt.net). It never leaves the BT network to be handed off to the destination:
Tracing route to gcp-us-west1-1.origin.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net [216.24.57.7]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms ************
2 4 ms 3 ms 4 ms ************
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * 6 ms * 62.172.102.140
5 6 ms 14 ms 6 ms peer7-et-3-0-3.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.201.226]
6 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms transit1-xe-000.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [194.72.16.177]
7 6 ms 6 ms 7 ms 166-49-214-166.gia.bt.net [166.49.214.166]
8 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms 166-49-135-83.gia.bt.net [166.49.135.83]
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 * * * Request timed out.
[...times out continuously up to 30 hops...]
Next Steps
Because this is happening deep within the gia.bt.net transit layer, this appears to be a broken BGP route or an issue at a major peering exchange point between BT/EE and Cloudflare/Render's upstream network.
Could a forum moderator please escalate this traceroute directly to the Tier 2/Tier 3 Network Engineering/NOC teams? Standard customer service handles cannot resolve backbone routing table issues.
I suspect this affects many other internet services hosted on that IP range that Cloudflare/Render uses.
Thank you.
[Mod edit: Personal details redacted. Please do not share personal details as your posts are visible to the public. Thanks!]
