Cloudflare misidentifies Hetzner IPs as being located in Iran

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Misclassified Hetzner IPs and Operational Impact

  • Multiple reports of Hetzner IPs being treated as Iranian by Cloudflare, Google, Oracle Cloud and others.
  • Concrete breakages: Kubernetes nodes unable to pull images from Google container registries (including official k8s images), Elastic registry issues, CI builds randomly failing as autoscaling lands on “tainted” IPs.
  • IPv6 sometimes works as a workaround, but many registries (e.g., GitHub) lack full IPv6 support.
  • GitLab reportedly can’t fix it while depending on Cloudflare; issue considered unresolved by some.

Proposed Causes of Misclassification

  • Common hypothesis: Hetzner acquired IPv4 ranges previously used by Iranian hosts/CDNs, and geo/databases didn’t update.
  • Others suggest correlation from VPN/tunnel usage (Hetzner IPs heavily used by Iranian users; Accept-Language and GPS data feed into models).
  • Similar mislocation anecdotes for other providers (Linode IPv6, Tor exit relays, “Japan” vs US IP confusion).
  • One commenter points to a specific case where an IP had a prior life in an Iran-based ad CDN.
  • Several note Cloudflare likely relies on MaxMind-style geolocation; IPinfo describes how they try to avoid such errors with active measurements and rapid corrections.

GeoIP Blocking, Sanctions, and Compliance

  • Many services block by country for:
    • Security (reducing spam, brute-force, scanners).
    • Regulatory reasons (US sanctions, OFAC, ITAR; fear of personal and corporate liability).
    • GDPR avoidance (some US sites block all EU IPs).
  • Disagreement over legal necessity: some say sanctions don’t require blanket IP blocking and explicitly allow many internet/info flows; companies over-comply for CYA.

Effectiveness and Ethics of Country/IP Blocking

  • Critics: GeoIP is error-prone and trivial to bypass with VPNs, while harming innocents (e.g., Iranian students, regular Russian users).
  • Supporters: even inaccurate blocking reduces risk and unwanted traffic cheaply; some customers “aren’t worth having.”
  • Debate over collective punishment vs targeting regimes; whether cutting off services actually helps weaken adversarial governments or just reinforces propaganda.

Cloudflare’s Role and DDoS Protection Debate

  • Some see Cloudflare’s dominance and false positives (e.g., blocking privacy-hardened browsers) as centralizing power and undermining open access.
  • Others describe Cloudflare as the only affordable, effective way small sites could stop major DDoS and bot abuse after extensive failed DIY attempts.
  • Discussion of alternatives finds many solutions expensive or less accessible; contention over whether dependency on Cloudflare is “lazy” or pragmatic.

GDPR, Identity, and IP Address Subthread

  • Long side debate on:
    • GDPR scope and difficulty: some say “don’t track, delete reasonably fast” is easy; others describe heavy process, documentation, and deletion obligations.
    • IP addresses as personal data under GDPR vs their use for analytics and blocking.
    • Divergent national practices around proof of residence and centralized address records.

Broader Political and Social Context

  • Sanctions discussion expands to US global sanctions footprint, multipolar vs unipolar world, and how passport/ nationality massively shapes access to services, travel, and opportunity.
  • First-hand accounts from sanctioned/isolated countries (Iran, Russia) highlight daily service blocks, payment issues, and feelings of being punished for government actions they can’t realistically influence.
  • Others counter that these hardships are an inevitable part of pressure on aggressive regimes, and Western states have limited non-military tools.