Some Virgin Media UK Users Can’t Load Popular jQuery Library
Several of Virgin Media’s (VMO2) UK broadband ISP customers, both on their business and residential connections, have reported that the provider appears to be blocking or incorrectly routing calls to load the popular jQuery library (code.jquery.com) – this is used by many websites, including this one, for some processes.
The issue appears to be sporadic as it impacts some customers, but not others, and a handful of people on other ISPs have also reported it. Customers first began reporting it to ISPreview on Thursday, and it’s since been mentioned on social media (Twitter), via ISPr’s forum and on Virgin’s own Community Forum.
Users impacted by this tend to find that the jQuery domain won’t load, while attempts to ping it or conduct a traceroute will fail or timeout. But in other cases, customers have reported that ping and traceroutes to the domain do work, yet their browser still fails to load the library in the background when it’s called. In some cases, websites may be so dependent upon jQuery that it could even prevent the whole site from loading properly.
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The issue may well be related to the Highwinds Content Delivery Network (CDN) that hosts the jQuery domain. In the meantime, changing to a third-party DNS provider won’t circumvent the issue, but using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) will.
Virgin Media has yet to provide us with an official comment and we suspect that the bank holiday weekend will now get in the way, although the provider has told customers that they’re “currently investigating the issue“. Some feedback that came in late last night also suggested that the issue may have now been resolved, but we’re awaiting further feedback to confirm.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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VM have a very unclear process on how and why they restrict access to parts of the internet. It is likely that some IP addresses of the CDN are currently blocked due to other content being served by the CDN.
Their normal blocking process breaks sessions to the address, but leaves pings and dns working.
The ‘how’ part they do it the same way that BT do, redirect requests for certain IP addresses to a proxy server.
The ‘why’ something hosted there ended up on the IWF URL list. https://www.iwf.org.uk/our-technology/our-services/url-list/url-blocking-faqs/
jQuery? In 2023? What on Earth are you using it for?
The Okta (IAM for customer and workforce) admin console uses jQuery.
For making fruit salad of course.
Sorry that it’s not to your fickle tastes, but some software uses it, it still works, and why rewrite software that works just because some random person (or robot) on the internet thinks it isn’t cool?
And what are the other ISP’s commenting on the problem ?
Why would other ISPs comment on a relatively small issue like this which is affecting a minority of users?
Lost all of Thursday to this issue.
It’s not just Virgin as we have two connections at the office and it wasn’t working on either of them.
It may be more prevalent on VM but wasn’t limited to them.
Who provides the other one?
Glide
Why Making Systems Dependent On IP Access To 3rd Parties You Have No Control Over Is A Bad Idea.
Example #98
Before we even go near ITSEC considerations (See: BA, inter alia).
Interesting – I’ve also noticed on the O2 network that MercedesMe applications persistently fail to work / connect to the car. Either all the requests time out or the applications fails to connect repeatedly to the Mercedes servers that sit in between. CONNECT VPN works first time everytime. So does seem like VMO2 are blocking stuff that’s needed. Disconnect VPN and back to same issues unable to connect.
I had this probem but it is now working for me!
Anything like this should be hosted on website directly to prevent being a potential watering hole. I am wondering how these websites can pass pen tests.
One can technically provide a checksum to validate the library, so the security risk can be properly mitigated. Most people don’t do this, of course.