Routing failure on BT/EE Backbone blocking access to Render.com / Cloudflare

[tomble]

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

• EE Home Broadband: 100% failure rate. Test-NetConnection on port 443 fails with a TCP timeout.

• 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.

• Vodafone Mobile Hotspot: 100% success rate. Instantly connects to the destination on port 443.

• 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:

Plaintext

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!]

[XRaySpeX]

It traces fine here over EE FF150 (the Blank Bullet):

16:44:50.34 C:\>tracert http://dashboard.render.com/
Unable to resolve target system name http://dashboard.render.com/.

16:45:19.30 C:\>tracert dashboard.render.com

Tracing route to gcp-us-west1-1.origin.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net [216.24.57.251]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms OrangeRouter2 [192.168.1.2]
2 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 172.16.14.26
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 62.172.102.78
5 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 213.121.193.153
6 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms transit1-xe-0-0-1.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [194.72.16.179]
7 5 ms 4 ms 4 ms 166-49-214-192.gia.bt.net [166.49.214.192]
8 7 ms 5 ms 5 ms t2c3-et-8-3-0.uk-lof.gia.bt.net [166.49.195.182]
9 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms t2c4-et-3-0-5-1.uk-lof.gia.bt.net [166.49.250.59]
10 6 ms 6 ms 5 ms linx-lon1.as13335.net [195.66.225.179]
11 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 141.101.71.1
12 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 141.101.71.133
13 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 216.24.57.251

Trace complete.

---

What is the name of the EE BB plan you are on including its speed? Which EE router & WiFi extenders, if any, do you have (read label or post a pix)?

[XRaySpeX]

This user discussion group is not the correct platform for formally escalating issues & requiring their fix in EE systems. You need to report your issues to CS. Failing any progress that way you could raise a complaint.

[JimM11]

@tomble Good on the vodafone broadband network also.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| ZenWiFi_XT8-BBD0 - 0 | 61 | 61 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| 90.247.128.1 - 0 | 61 | 61 | 4 | 163 | 326 | 155 |
| 63.130.172.35 - 58 | 19 | 8 | 11 | 12 | 14 | 11 |
| 90.255.251.37 - 0 | 61 | 61 | 12 | 14 | 30 | 12 |
| 162.158.32.45 - 0 | 61 | 61 | 11 | 15 | 78 | 13 |
| 216.24.57.251 - 0 | 61 | 61 | 11 | 12 | 18 | 12 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

[Steve_BT]

It's working fine from my EE connection at home. Are you still seeing the issues? As you can see from @XRaySpeX traceroute, the next hop is a direct peering to linx-lon1.as13335.net so we'd have no control once traffic leaves our network. Maybe they were blocking our IP ranges or something.

Steve

[matthubbert77]

I'm glad to find this post - I've been suffering with the same issue, seemingly affecting only EE/BT connections. My client I host websites for has been really angry and struggled to accept it's a BT issue, despite Render support providing proof of this.

@Steve_BT  if you keep refreshing pages for long enough, you'll find it eventually takes a minute to load. This happens multiple times an hour for me (on EE). It's unacceptable.

I did my own troubleshooting and found in my logs theres nothing wrong with my app - once the request hits the app it processes instantly. But something is preventing the request from reaching the app in the first place.

Render have apparently been hit with an inrush of support tickets, all coming from BT customers, and have pushed it back to me saying to raise a case with BT. This is hard since I'm not a BT customer. They provided some tests they did which proves other internet providers work fine, while there is consistently intermittent problems with BT connections. This is their response to my ticket and how they ran their test with globalping:

You can provide this output to your client who disputes a BT-specific issue:

> London, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856), u-wii747
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:12 GMT

> Levisham, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
Request timeout.

> Middlesbrough, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856), u-PS6
Request timeout.

> Blackpool, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

> Woking, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:13 GMT

> London, GB, EU, YouFibre (AS212655), u-temilash
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

> Bridgend, GB, EU, YouFibre (AS212655), u-matthewgall
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

> Manchester, GB, EU, YouFibre (AS212655), u-matthewgall
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

> Tipton, GB, EU, YouFibre (AS212655)
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

> Cardiff, GB, EU, YouFibre (AS212655)
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:47:11 GMT

The issue as we've seen is sporadic request failures when using BT. This output displays 100% success via another ISP (YouFibre), and 3/5 successes across BT when accessing https://***.onrender.com 

The system I'm using for generating these pings is globalping.io, running it a second time, BT only:

> London, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
Request timeout.

> Levisham, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:50:24 GMT

> Woking, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
Request timeout.

> Middlesbrough, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856), u-PS6
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:50:24 GMT

> Blackpool, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
Request timeout.

> London, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856), u-wii747
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:50:24 GMT

> London, GB, EU, British Telecommunications (AS2856)
Request timeout.

3/7 successful. This problem is localized to BT, and BT needs to address it.

[JimM11]

@matthubbert77 Are you on a business or residential EE connection?

[matthubbert77]

Personally I'm on a 4G router, my clients who use the website are likely on a Business (BT) connection.

[JimM11]

@matthubbert77    Business Broadband | Fibre | Small Business | EE Business

or

Business Broadband & Connectivity solutions | BT Business

Places that may be better to start, Are you a EE or BT customer at all?

[JimM11]

@matthubbert77 Still clear this end vodafone BB connected network so you know.

C:\Windows\System32>tracert dashboard.render.com

Tracing route to gcp-us-west1-1.origin.onrender.com.cdn.cloudflare.net [216.24.57.9]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms ZenWiFi_XT8-BBD0 [192.168.50.1]
2 6 ms 5 ms 4 ms 90.247.128.1
3 11 ms 12 ms 13 ms 63.130.172.35
4 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms 90.255.251.37
5 20 ms 20 ms 23 ms 162.158.32.45
6 12 ms 13 ms 12 ms 216.24.57.9

Trace complete.