Update:
We are happy to say that since November 23rd the domain b-cdn.net is no longer blocked and connectivity across Turkey has been restored. We are preparing a new abuse page to allow an easier way of reporting abuse or illegal content.
On the evening of the 16th of November, we received multiple reports of connectivity issues from users located in Turkey. Upon further investigation, we found that our b-cdn.net hostname has been blocked by the Turkish authorities. This has come as quite a shock to us, as we have had no communication regarding any malicious or unwanted activities. As always, we want to be fully transparent about what's going on and update you with how we plan to resolve this.
The domain name is used by close to 14.000 websites or services so we cannot pinpoint what exactly caused this. We immediately jumped into action and sent an appeal to the Turkish authorities explaining that the domain is a part of a public CDN with many thousands of websites and services with an intent to fully cooperate with the Turkish government in order to resolve the issue.
Partial country-wide DNS Level Block
Our investigation found that the block appears to be occurring at the DNS level so that all requests for b-cdn.net that are sent through some Turkish ISPs do not get resolved. This also impacts all subdomains of b-cdn.net, and these do not resolve as well. Unfortunately, this also means that all custom hostnames configured using CNAME records pointing to the domain are affected as well, as these are mapped to b-cdn.net and the CDN IP.
The Solution?
Our immediate reaction to this was to set up a secondary DNS only domain that users can use to set up their CNAME. This makes it easier for the Turkish government to block only the "bad actors" and their own domains and not the DNS level domain that would affect all the other users. Using the new CNAME domain, legitimate users will not be seeing issues due to the ban by using a custom hostname while we attempt to restore connectivity b-cdn.net.
We are closely monitoring the situation and treating this with the highest possible priority. We hope the Turkish government will cooperate with us to find and block only the "bad actors" that caused the issue and reduce the block to only specific b-cdn.net subdomains.
The Scale
With less than 1% of our traffic going to Turkey, this is not a huge scale block, however, it is entirely unacceptable from our point of view and we will attempt to do everything in our power to resolve this as soon as possible.
If we cannot come to a resolution, we hope to switch up the shared domains that we use into many smaller groups to work around the problem and assure perfect connectivity for our users.
We would like to thank you for your understanding and once again apologize for the inconvenience caused.
The blog post will be updated with further developments as they come in.