Something strange happened yesterday. My ISP had some kind of meltdown and blocked access to VPN, Tor and most of, if not all privacy related websites including all major Linux distributions and even privacyguides. Confusingly some sites like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix etc were also blocked. I was only able to browse a select few like Youtube, Google, Duckduckgo etc. I was unable to bypass the block using Tor Browser. Telegram app which has hardcoded dns was also not able to connect. I registered a complaint and now it is rectified. This is the first occurence since I started using internet (two decades) and the ISP is one of the lazy ones which don’t implement strict blocking even if there is a court order (porn mostly). But I wonder what happened. Can anyone enlighten me?
This is very weird indeed. Do you live in an authoritarian country? Does your ISP have bad reviews?
You’re contradicting yourself here. Please explain.
Also, which country are you in?
If Tor works, then VPNs can work too - what you tried with them? Which VPNs did you try using and how? What other troubleshooting steps have you taken?
You have only explained your problem in a confusingly but have not shared what you have done to mitigate them before posting here (and how were you able to post here if PG is blocked too)?
You need to elaborate a lot more. My best guess right now, depending on the country, is that this is a misconfiguration from your ISPs end and is a mistake if everything was working fine until now.
To clarify, very few sites where available. All the others were blocked. I tried accessing blocked sites by means of Cloudflare Warp, Proton VPN and Tor Browser. These tools were unable to establish a connection. As I said earlier, I raised a complaint and they rectified it. They said some issue on their part caused this. But I don’t know how a part of web is available and the rest blocked including VPN connection and Tor connection.
Confidently an eroding democracy. But ISP in fine. Never had an issue. And it probably affected few customers. No widespread report.
What country specifically? It’s easier to help you if we know what their capabilities are.
more likely just a peering issue or your ipv6 broke and was timing out or similar
Most likely just an ordinary fuckup by the ISP. Now that it’s gone you can’t collect much data, but it could be a number of common reasons:
- DNS broke, so only your recently visited domains resolved
- Peering issue, some specific ASes were unreachable
- Networking issue where ipv6 broke, so ipv6 sites didn’t work
how much are you willing to spend as a stop-gap against future interruptions? Several people have asked about your location not to be invasive but to assist with better circumvention recommendations. Perhaps you could acknowledge it is a place LIKE china or iran?
Popular for draconian regimes are these keyword sets:
vless reality
vmess
openvpn over cloak
These are DPI thwarting VPN flavors. For the IRAN concern it seems they monitor total data to certain endpoints so you might want more than one, or not use it exclusively for all traffic
I didn’t want to reveal my location because I am completely confident that it is not a government thing and merely an ISP issue. Thanks for the keyword sets 
To keep from wearing my tinfoil hat all the time I try never to blame something on malice when mere incompetence will do☺
WAIT SOMETHING LIKE THAT HAPPENED TO ME TOO. It lasted 5 hours, i contacted my isp accusing them of running censorship test, they claimed it was an issue that happened and that they had resolved it. Funny thing is that it exactly lasted 5 hours. 5:00 am and everything returned to normal.
Tor was blocked too, 1 bridge allowed me to connect.