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Looks like Russia got a (partial?) restriction to access Stack Overflow after the IPs of the SO sites were changed during the recent maintenance.

Affected sites example:
https://ru.stackoverflow.com/
https://stackoverflow.com/

> nslookup stackoverflow.com
Server:  <My NS>
Address:  <My NS IP>

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:      stackoverflow.com
Addresses: 188.114.98.224
           188.114.99.224

Both these IPs are banned at https://eais.rkn.gov.ru/ (Russian Government banned domains and IPs registry).

The SE sites are unavailable in Russia for now (Connection timeout).

UPD: Some ISPs don't block the traffic to the same IPs.

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  • 13
    Do I interpret correctly: Is that because stackoverflow was migrated on Google Cloud, and Google services are basically banned in Russia ? Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 9:03
  • @Pac0 correct.. Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 9:07
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    Might be problematic to fix then. Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 9:17
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    For me, stackoverflow.com resolves to 188.114.98.224, and it loads, but very slowly. I need to wait around 10 seconds to load some pages. It might be a technical issue related to cloud migration, not a block. Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 11:16
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    Was IP address actually changed? It was promised that IPs will stay the same during cloud migration: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/… Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 11:24
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    It is in fact unclear to me why Stack Overflow resolves to Google Cloud from Russia, considering it should be proxied through Cloudflare. Sounds like a bug to me, actually. Commented Apr 2, 2025 at 16:05
  • @nicael it's Cloudflare's IP though, not Google Cloud. Looks like Russia has been blocking some Cloudflare IPs. Meanwhile, I got Stack Overflow resolved to different Cloudflare's IPs: 172.64.155.249 and 104.18.32.7. Commented Apr 3, 2025 at 3:32
  • It's odd that CloudFlare directs him to Indiana (188.114.98.224) when he's in Russia. Instead he should be given a Russian CloudFlare IP address; so that's likely a configuration error outside of SE. Commented Apr 3, 2025 at 4:12
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    @Pac0 google services aren't banned but they fix IP behind owners of websites. If IP was servicing a diffrent website which was banned by IP, it becomes banned , permanently., It's idiotic, yeha, but it's desined by people who have no idea how network works. Commented Apr 3, 2025 at 8:18
  • @Swift totally agree. The main issue is that the block is nearly impossible to remove. Commented Apr 3, 2025 at 11:22
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    It seems as though the GCP migration has inadvertently caused Cloudflare to serve the network from an IP that is blocked within Russia. We do have some remediation options, but they are complex. We need to do some further investigation, but by best estimate we're probably a while out from being able to fix this. We are actively evaluating, but I'm dropping this into [status-deferred] for now. Commented Apr 3, 2025 at 17:25
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    @Slate UPD: looks like English SO domain now resolved to different IP set: 188.114.98.228 and 188.114.99.228, which is still present in the blocklist but the access isn't restricted by ISPs. But it may still result in partial restrictions across Russia. Commented Apr 29, 2025 at 20:18
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    @aepot Thanks for the update. I've informed our Site Reliability Engineering folks. Commented Apr 29, 2025 at 21:05

1 Answer 1

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Short version: Hey folks! We made a change that hopefully improved the situation with being blocked in Russia. If you see any improvements, please let us know.

Longer version: Earlier this year, Russia blocked access to Stack Overflow and related sites as a side-effect of blocking a few IPs from Cloudflare, the CDN that we use. This happened because our Cloudflare IPs changed after we moved Stack into GCP. We recently made a change to try and address the issue. The change is that now our websites use a new IP address (generally in the range of 198.252.206.0/24). We would appreciate feedback if people see any improvement.

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    No issues for now while direct accessing SO, SO.ru, MSE and Code Review instances. Thank you! Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 18:56

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