Update: More people are having problems (here and here). The problem is apparently caused by using any external DNS (Google DNS for example). This is very weird.
This is not surprising. Some STC customers (including me, Muneeb in Dhahran and Abdullah in Riyadh) are having problems accessing Google. This appears to be random because others told me that it’s working properly.
This is not only effecting searches but Google Reader, Google Analytics, Youtube and other services! This is the error message by the way:
Network Error (tcp_error)
A communication error occurred: “Operation timed out”
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.For assistance, contact your network support team.
Please, STC: fix your servers already.
Here are the STC Afaq DSL Shamil modem passwords. Thanks to Aly in the comments of this post for posting these.
This will hopefully help frustrated users who can’t change the settings:
Sagem - F@st 1201 (Sagem Firmware) admin admin
Sagem - F@st 2404 (Sagem Firmware) admin admin
Sagem - F@st 2504 (Sky Firmware) admin sky
Sagem - F@st 2604 (JaWeb French Firmware) admin admin
Sagem - F@st 3102 (Sagem Firmware) user user
Sagem - FST 3202 (Livebox English Firmware) admin admin
Sagem - FST 3202 (Livebox French Firmware) admin admin
Check the comments provided kindly by Aly for more info.
Something odd is appearing to Internet users in Saudi Arabia, random sites for no reason give the following error:
ERROR. Access Denied. Access Denied by security policy.
The security policy for your network prevents your request from being allowed at this time.
Other people on twitter reported they have the same issue and all of them are subscribers to Saudi Telecom (STC).
On some STC Afaq DSL connections you may encounter an error message on some websites combined with a lot of DSL disconnections. The error is:
Access Denied (license_expired)
A license has expired on the Proxy, and your request is not permitted: “The SGOS license has expired”. A new license must be obtained.
For assistance, contact your network support team.
SGOS is a proxy server operating system by Blue Coat Systems. STC is supposed to be the leading telecommunications and Internet company in Saudi Arabia and a company of that scale shouldn’t allow important software such as SGOS to expire.
That image was found while searching for stc.com.sa on google images.
Strange problems are happening with some STC AFAQ DSL Shamil servers. It used to happen on some websites depending on your IP address. But now there is a problem with all HTTP connections on some of STC servers. You can still ping but no HTTP access.
Check your IP address from your DSL modem admin page or simply visit this website (but since you are offline then this site will be useless). If your IP address is one of the following: 94.99.119.* / 94.99.22.* / 94.99.117.* (there are others but those are the ones that I confirmed) simply disconnect and reconnect and you will get a new IP address. I have confirmed that the following IP addresses work: 77.31.250.* / 77.30.90.* / 94.97.48.*.
STC as usual isn’t helping. How can you tell them that some of their proxy servers (I assume) are broken. Just keep those IP numbers in mind.