Why is Akamai blocking me?
Akamai does not block users from accessing our customers’ websites. However, our customers can use tools and policies which may in turn block you (the end user). Our customers use these rules to protect them and you from malicious actors on the internet. Some common reasons could include:
- Explicit IP blocking / blacklisting
- Location-based blacklisting
- Rule-based blocking (i.e. web application firewall protections)
- Reputation-based blocking
- HTTP request rate controls (e.g. DoS protections)
The following activities may trigger application security controls:
- Web application layer attacks such as: SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, Local File Inclusion, Remote Command Execution, Remote File Inclusion, etc.
- Volumetric attacks or similar high rate HTTP traffic
- Web contents scraping, data mining, web content indexing and similar automated web activities
- Web vulnerability scanning using automated tools
Your reputation follows you. If your IP is identified as behaving poorly on one site, you may be blocked on other websites. A first step in troubleshooting may be to determine whether your organization is performing one of the activities listed above that could affect your reputation.
You can use our Client Reputation lookup application at https://www.akamai.com/us/en/clientrep-lookup/ to check whether your connecting IP address received a bad reputation score and submit an investigation request in case you believe it was mistakenly flagged as malicious.
When a page cannot be accessed, whether because of a customer policy blocking access to that resource or a variety of other reasons such as a server error, the error page will typically be presented as follows:
