Venezuela: Troubles to access Blogger.com
During all the month of August, Venezuelan bloggers have been complaining about difficulties to access Blogger.com services. A thread was opened [es] in Google support forums, according to which, traceroutes made by users are giving different kind of responses, being the most frequent one “Destination host unreachable”.
According to users, the problems are intermittent and are preventing them from entering their dashboards and their own blogs. Also, they have said that it's possible to access Blogger using the alternative Google's DNS, when the problem presents.
Users report that this has ocurred before, and there are other threads, from 2010, reporting similar issues. However, the problem never has lasted this long, and never before caught the attention of the mainstream media. A few days ago, one of the main Venezuelan newspapers, Últimas Noticias [es], reported:
Según las denuncias, se está produciendo una limitación en los servidores DNS de Cantv en Venezuela que dificulta el acceso de usuarios y blogueros al famoso sitio Blogger.com perteneciente a Google, donde se crean los conocidos “blogspot”.
On Twitter, users have expressed their concern:
@euglidesgarcia: En VENEZUELA hay problemas para acceder a las paginas de Blogger… Y no hay quien de respuesta o posibles razones de esta situación…!!!
@concienciavial: @googledevlatam saludos.Desd Venezuela pregunto: ¿por q tantos problemas para cargar blogger desd cualquier navegador?es aquí o son ustedes?
Citizens claim that, even when the problems have been profusely reported to CANTV (the main, government-owned, Venezuelan ISP), the company has not provided any answer, nor have they solved the issue.
3 comments
When I lived in Venezuela, the worst outage I ever saw was on a day with particularly much political instability (right after Chavez lost the constitutional referendum and his defense secretary resigned, prompting coup rumors). I had CANTV internet and had no problem reaching sites within Venezuela, but all foreign domains were unavailable for most of the day. People with other ISPs had no problem. I inquired around to try and determine if there was any chance that it was an intentional outage, but never got any confirmation that it was even a widespread phenomenom, much less whether it was intentional.
Since then, there have been reports that the government has pressured other ISPs to use CANTV’s international gateway. I don’t know if the other ISPs ever went along.
We have the same problem in Bangladesh for several months. There is also a Google support thread (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=7501c4d1f8fe9452&hl=en).
I have found an workaround with the alternative Google’s DNS, a solution found in the above mentioned thread. But not everybody knows it and we don’t know why its not available to users of some ISPs while some are able to access.