tldr; - some Google Chrome users are being blocked from the site - I am aware of this and it may become more widespread.
The full version:
Most web browsers use a protocol called https to retrieve the pages from web servers.
Chrome also has a protocol known as QUIC which is more modern, but not yet widely implemented on servers.
Normally Chrome tries to use QUIC first, and when it doesn't receive a response from the server or receives a bad response it falls back to using https.
The RTG servers support https, but not QUIC, so this is what happens in our case.
For some reason, since yesterday, there have been instances where instead of making a couple of attempts to use QUIC and then falling back to https, we have seen browsers making hundreds of attempts to use QUIC.
This is being seen by the web servers firewall as an attack on the server, and it is temporarily disabling access from the "attacking" IP address.
Once blocked, it won't matter which browser you use until the firewall opens up access to that IP address again (typically an hour or so later)
So far, looking at the logs, only about a dozen people have had the issue - but I suspect it will become more widespread until we can find a solution for it - obviously once people are blocked, they can't read this message - so hopefully by getting this message out early whilst working on a solution, anyone else losing access will at least be aware of why it is happening.
The full version:
Most web browsers use a protocol called https to retrieve the pages from web servers.
Chrome also has a protocol known as QUIC which is more modern, but not yet widely implemented on servers.
Normally Chrome tries to use QUIC first, and when it doesn't receive a response from the server or receives a bad response it falls back to using https.
The RTG servers support https, but not QUIC, so this is what happens in our case.
For some reason, since yesterday, there have been instances where instead of making a couple of attempts to use QUIC and then falling back to https, we have seen browsers making hundreds of attempts to use QUIC.
This is being seen by the web servers firewall as an attack on the server, and it is temporarily disabling access from the "attacking" IP address.
Once blocked, it won't matter which browser you use until the firewall opens up access to that IP address again (typically an hour or so later)
So far, looking at the logs, only about a dozen people have had the issue - but I suspect it will become more widespread until we can find a solution for it - obviously once people are blocked, they can't read this message - so hopefully by getting this message out early whilst working on a solution, anyone else losing access will at least be aware of why it is happening.
Last edited: