Amazon Prime Video blocking sonic IP

[vschirado]

Hi, is anyone else noticing this issue is back? I'm being blocked by Amazon now, with the same message as the original poster about being on a VPN or proxy service. I've tried rebooting the ONT and Eero to get a new IP, but that hasn't worked. In addition, I get an error 73 from Disney+ as well, meaning they also think I'm on a VPN, so I think this must be coming from some common third party provider that both services are using?

Anyway, it's been about a week since I could use either service, so if anyone has any ideas on how to get this fixed, I'm all ears. Both services are incredibly useless at fixing it so far, I don't think I've even gotten to the point where someone understands the issue.

[vschirado]

Is this not happening to anyone else right now? I got it fixed mid-month only to have to unplug my ONT which ended up grabbing me a different IP address and now I'm being blocked again. So tired of going to random websites or services and finding my regular old IP blocked for "being a proxy or VPN."

Ironically, if I DO go on a VPN... Sometimes the services work.

[ngufra]

Would connecting to sonic vpn give you an IP Address in a different block that would not be flagged as invalid for streaming?

https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/article ... PN-Service

[kgc]

Have you reported this to the respective services and opened support tickets? There's not much that we can do here.

[system]

For two weeks my Amazon Prime video has been blocked. Prime Video shows the same error message on all devices, "Your device is connected to the Internet using a VPN or proxy service. Please disable it and try again. For more help, go to amazon.com/pv-vpn"

I'm using IP 198.27.189.3 I called Amazon customer service but they are completely unhelpful - they only offer three solutions:

1. Logoff the app then login again [I tried that and it didn't help]

2. Restart your router [I tried that and it didn't help]

3. Call your internet service provider and ask them to stop routing you through a VPN

I wonder if any technical support people at Sonic have a way to contact Amazon's network engineering people, to ask Amazon to unblock my dynamic IP address?

[virtualmike]

I don't have any direct experience with Amazon, but I've found that in general, soliciting help from big companies via Twitter/X, Facebook, or other social media seems to get better results.

If the company doesn't respond to a DM, then I post in the open feed with a tag to the company and maybe a few news orgs, and that usually will get their attention.

[kgc]

I wonder if any technical support people at Sonic have a way to contact Amazon's network engineering people, to ask Amazon to unblock my dynamic IP address?

No, generally speaking it's even worse for us as a provider vs customer unless we have a back door into the other company through an acquaintance. In the old days, we'd expect to get good responses to emails sent to support@ or noc@ and these days its not even worth bothering.

I concur that for something like this it's probably worth publicly shaming Amazon to see if you can get the attention of someone with the ability to address it. I would also suggest continuing to ask for your tickets to be escalated and repeat to them that you are not on a VPN.

I am stuck with Comcast at home and I wasn't able to get a problem resolved with them until I filed a complaint with the better business bureau at which point I got a call from someone in their corporate offices who owned the problem until it was done.

[ngufra]

Isn't sonic large enough to have some amazon prime infra inside its network simialr to netflix open connect?
If so, the traffic would not leave sonic's network, and how would they resolve the end point as being behind a vpn then?

[kgc]

Isn't sonic large enough to have some amazon prime infra inside its network simialr to netflix open connect?
If so, the traffic would not leave sonic's network, and how would they resolve the end point as being behind a vpn then?

It looks like Amazon does provide some edge caching services and I asked our Network engineering team to look into that (and a couple of other possible partnerships.) Generally speaking we're peered with large traffic sources and so edge caching isn't necessarily needed to provide the benefits you'd typically see from them. But, the likely problem is that they're using a feed from some 3rd party provider that has incorrectly flagged some blocks in our network as being VPN services. This problem has occurred occasionally over the past several years with Amazon and Netflix.

[vschirado]

So, Amazon seems to be better these days, but got a power outage the other day and now Netflix is blocking content to my IP address. Their support is completely unhelpful, even worse than Amazon - just repeating over and over that the ISP has to fix it. I'm so tired of this. I wish we could figure out what third party services are in use to flag this stuff to get the IPs cleared with them. Anyone have any ideas?