[2022] 7 March 2022 - Connection Issues (Mexico & South America)

Hello everyone,

We are investigating connectivity issues to players in Mexico and several South American countries. Users in affected areas who are experiencing an inability to connect, please submit a support ticket under the Technical category with the following information:

• IP address
• ISP name
• Region location
• City
• Traceroute information*

Please DO NOT post these details as a reply in this thread as they will contain private information.

*Please note that the traceroute we are looking for is to TQ; on Windows this can be done from a command line like this:

tracert tranquility.servers.eveonline.com

Thank you

We’ve had a few reports recently about this particular issue, but only from EVE players in Latin America – mostly Mexico and Chile. Based on metrics (particularly daily active users from Chile) then this started on 24 February.

The errors are puzzling. Based on the logs we have seen so far then the connection to the Server doesn’t appear to be blocked and it isn’t terminated by the Server or any network equipment. Rather there is this in the logs Invalid answer from server GetServerStatus when the Client tries to authenticate to the Server.

We suspect that somewhere there is possibly some network traffic inspection (filtering or proxy; possibly there is blocking, either a direct block or something that times out) since we are seeing CORS header errors in the Launcher as well, indicating that the headers have been stripped by some middle layer, but primarily that mangled reply to the Client that the Client is unable to decipher. There are sometimes also other network errors.

So far then everyone that have used a VPN connection or have switched ISPs are able to connect again. Note that a VPN connection will bypass whatever fault there is on the network path.

Everyone that have raised tickets with us from Mexico are using “Total Play Telecomunicaciones SA de CV” as their ISP, as far as we can tell from the data we have gathered so far, whereas in other countries this is happening at more ISPs.

Please open a ticket with your ISP and ask them if they are blocking, scanning, filtering, proxying, or manipulating your network traffic in any manner. This would include if there are transparent proxies. In particular ask them to make sure that traffic to

• launcher.eveonline.com // HTTPS
• login.eveonline.com // HTTPS
• cis.eveonline.com // HTTPS
• tranquility.servers.eveonline.com // 172.65.201.188, TCP, port 26000

is not being blocked, scanned, filtered, proxied, or manipulated.

Also tell them that EVE Online’s servers are fronted by Cloudflare (AS 13335) and ask them about how traffic from their customers is routed to Cloudflare. Are they directly peering with Cloudflare? Please ask them to investigate if that connection is OK and that the prefix for 172.65.201.188 is correctly and properly routed.

@Adelrad and I have been discussing this in his thread Connection to Server was closed, unable to connect on port 26000 but we decided today to start an official thread.

At the same time our internal network partner Advania opened a support case with our external network partner Cloudflare that is in particular aimed at investigating the connection between “Total Play Telecomunicaciones SA de CV” and Cloudflare.

I still very strongly recommend that all customers of all ISPs, including Total Play, contact their ISP and raise this issue with their ISP.

(And if anyone replies and says it must be CCP – then I kindly refer them to 20220225 - Connection Issues (UK) - #2 by CCP_Explorer from last week and Cannot stay connected for more than a few minutes D/C - #52 by CCP_Explorer from May 2020. We here at CCP do not control ISPs’ networks.)

Our network partners Advania and Cloudflare have been digging into this today and have found network traffic possibly being dropped somewhere inside Level 3’s network, affecting network connections in Santiago CL, Lima PE, Mexico City MX. This would match the symptoms we are seeing. Changes have been made to try and circumvent this possible fault.

Can you all please try again to connect to TQ (without a VPN) and let us know how it goes. Also, did your trace routes change?

Anyone?

Closing this incident.