Kagi.com inaccessible in mainland China

Loeya

Since June, www.kagi.com has been inaccessible in mainland China, though translate.kagi.com remains accessible. These 2 images shows the results of ping.pe query.

www.kagi.com ping query result. Link

translate.kagi.com ping query result. Link

LuanPhan

@Loeya Thanks for raising it!

In fact, translate.kagi.com and kagi.com are hosted on two different Google Load Balancers. We don't try to block any IP from our firewall by default. These PINGs are blocked somewhere, either the China Great Firewall or the GCP Backbone, we're unsure, based on the output of the attached image.

We also have this similar with some VPN providers, VPN connected users sometimes are rejected with 403 response, but it's on HTTP (Layer 7).

We had contacted GCP for these issues, but unfortunately, it's not resolved yet.

Loeya

LuanPhan Thank you for the quick and transparent reply.

I think you're right and it's likely an issue with the backbone network of Chinese carriers (the China Great Firewall side).

Is there a way to utilize a GCP Region with Better Peering? Like route traffic from mainland China through a specific GCP region for better connectivity, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Singapore etc? Or maybe consider a CDN with better routing like Cloudflare? I'd be more than happy to help test any potential solutions or provide more diagnostic data from my location (Shanghai, China).

Love Kagi and really hope we can get direct access back soon!

LuanPhan

Loeya Yes exactly how Kagi.com works so far, requests are always routed to the nearest regions because our Loadbalancer are served by Anycast IPs. We have supported 9 regions until now, we can add more regions later when needed. You can easily find all of them from Kagi's Status Page.

The disadvantage is we can't control how requests are routed. They are routed automatically by Google's internal routing rules.

Anyway, are you facing this connectivity issue from your end? If yes, can you show us the tracert output to Kagi.com?

If using Linux or Mac, please run

sudo traceroute -T -4 -p 443 kagi.com

If using Windows, please run

tracert kagi.com

Thank you!

Loeya

LuanPhan
Result

LuanPhan

@Loeya

Thank you for submitting the screenshots. According to the traceroute result, I am fairly certain that your ISP has dropped it. As shown above, after reaching the local subnet gateway at 192.168.71.1, the packet was immediately dropped at the next hop.

Can you contact them to ask why? Or try resetting your modem to see if any luck?

negi

@Loeya
Hi! I'm also experiencing the same connectivity issue from mainland China.
Has this been resolved for you? I've tested from both China Telecom and China Unicom
networks and both fail at their respective gateways. Would love to know if you found
any workarounds or if Kagi provided any updates.

Loeya

negi I received an email yesterday saying they were working on a fix, and today I found kagi.com is accessible in mainland China again.

pixel

Yes, connection from mainland China should be working again!

If anyone is still having issues, please post and let us know so we can look into it further.