can't authenticate aircraft, can't access website.

This is a repost from "Site Issues" subforum since I'm now out of the 2 day grace period, and can't even launch DCS.

hi. following a session of DCS today, I started getting the error "dcs website is not available at the moment". I thought it might be a temporary error but it's been a long time and what I've found out is interesting:

• Can access any other website.
  
• No device on this network can access digitalcombatsimulator.com
  
• All devices on this network can access digitalcombatsimulator.com via using a VPN
  
• My phone can access digitalcombatsimulator.com when using mobile data instead of home network.
  

I've tried:

• Rebooting computer
  
• Rebooting router
  
• using flushdns, renew, release commands on command line
  

Any help is greatly appreciated. I want to fly so bad!

Another interesting find: Neither the browser nor the game launcher can access digitalcombatsimulator.com. But I can ping the domain. 0% packet loss, ~65ms.

and here's the tracert output:

>tracert 91.134.1.104

Tracing route to www.digitalcombatsimulator.com [91.134.1.104]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

 1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
 2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 3     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 5     9 ms    10 ms     9 ms  212.156.38.21.static.turktelekom.com.tr [212.156.38.21]
 6     8 ms     9 ms     9 ms  34-acibadem-xrs-t2-2---34-acibadem-t3-5.statik.turktelekom.com.tr [81.212.217.124]
 7     *        9 ms     8 ms  81.212.203.228.static.turktelekom.com.tr [81.212.203.228]
 8    57 ms    48 ms    47 ms  306-mil-col-2---34-acibadem-xrs-t2-1.statik.turktelekom.com.tr [212.156.141.224]
 9    49 ms    50 ms    48 ms  mno-b2-link.telia.net [213.248.83.177]
10    50 ms    50 ms    67 ms  mil-5-a9.it.eu [54.36.50.138]
11   111 ms    65 ms    67 ms  be103.sbg-g1-nc5.fr.eu [91.121.215.194]
12    62 ms    60 ms    61 ms  be100-1254.th2-1-a9.fr.eu [94.23.122.139]
13    65 ms    67 ms    70 ms  be102.gra-g2-nc5.fr.eu [213.186.32.214]
14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
18    65 ms    65 ms    64 ms  www.digitalcombatsimulator.com [91.134.1.104]

Trace complete.

Just checked. Nobody on my ISP can reach DCS website. It fails right at the TLS handshake. I called the ISP to ask about the issue, they confirmed they're having some issues with websites abroad, but it seems to me like they're blocking the website using deep packet inspection. (that would surprise me but.. you check the above output and see where I'm living in).

Just checked. Nobody on my ISP can reach DCS website. It fails right at the TLS handshake.

Us Australians have just recovered from a similar issue, it took 2-3 weeks to resolve, no explanation from our ISP (Internode / IINET) as to the cause of the issue, I did all of the same process as you mentioned, and it seemed to be an issue with websites linked off the xxxx.fr.eu branch of servers, so it wasn't just the www.digitalcombatsimulator.com site.

Try using the "pathping" command for a more informative look at packet loss at the router and link stages.

ie: C:\Windows\system32>pathping -4 www.digitalcombatsimulator.com

This is unlikely to help you much as a lot of the server / routers don't respond to ping requests, so it will give 100% packet loss even when they are fully functioning correctly.

Good luck with it, was a nightmare for us here as well.

Regards, Ian.

It was our ISP. They probably broke their middleboxes they use for Deep Packet Inspection (not only it's not illegal here, it's also required by government from ISP's to use DPI for blocking some websites.). The TLS handshakes were not being successful. Only some websites served over https:// were affected.

DCS, AWS, yahoo, lichess etc. all kinds of various websites were broken. It seems to be fixed now. I hope it stays this way and they don't break it again. I was able to reactivate DCS by tunneling over my VPN but people weren't able to access their AWS servers for 56 hours.