Can't connect to research.microsoft.com on home Qwest DSL connection

Question

I have a puzzling issue regarding accessing research.microsoft.com from my home Qwest DSL connection. By default, I frequently get timeouts when accessing research.microsoft.com from Firefox, Safari, or Chrome on my Mac. I also cannot access the site from Internet Explorer in a Windows VM. However, I am able to access the site through proxify.com, so I know the site is not down. Furthermore, I haven't noticed problems accessing other sites (in particular, www.microsoft.com works fine). Also, I can access research.microsoft.com when I'm connected to networks other than my home Qwest DSL connection. Together, the above make me suspect a problem with either my router (Airport Express) or, more likely, my ISP.

Anyone have any thoughts on how I can narrow down the problem further? I could call my ISP and tell them the above, but my feeling is that probably won't get me very far. I can get by browsing research.microsoft.com through a proxy, but it would be nice to figure out what's going on here and fix the problem. Oh, the only relevant discussion I found via Google was here:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1311734.html

Update: Thanks to those who have tried to help! I found one other thing while Googling that may be vaguely relevant:

http://thedaneshproject.com/posts/supportmicrosoftcom-not-working-behind-squid/

Disabling the Accept-Encoding headers in Firefox actually didn't make a difference for me. I just thought the above might spark some other ideas about how mishandling of HTTP headers somewhere might be causing this problem. Thanks again!

Another update: In case anyone is still thinking about this; I've found that I can't surf research.microsoft.com using the links text-based browser, but I can reliably download individual files with wget. Maybe that helps?

Answer 1

Never quite figured this one out, but research.microsoft.com now works for me from home. Maybe they fixed something on their end. Others may want to try again too.

Answer 2

What IP address does the following give you?

dig research.microsoft.com

I get:

[..]
;; ANSWER SECTION:
research.microsoft.com. 617 IN  A   131.107.65.14

This is the same when using other DNS servers, like OpenDNS:

dig @208.67.222.222 research.microsoft.com

Update: as you get the same IP address, next step would be to compare the actually routing results to those of someone physically close to your place. I thought I was not having any issues using my own provider from The Netherlands, but today I cannot access that domain either. So, I guess this is a bad configuration (close) at Microsoft then; you can refer them to this post when complaining there.

traceroute -q 1 research.microsoft.com

traceroute to research.microsoft.com (131.107.65.14) [..]

 1  speedtouch (192.168.1.254)  29.850 ms
 2  lo1.dr5.d12.xs4all.net (194.109.5.219)  16.181 ms
 3  0.ge-3-3-0.xr4.1d12.xs4all.net (194.109.7.157)  15.721 ms
 4  asd-dc2-ias-ur10.nl.kpn.net (194.151.244.74)  15.172 ms
 5  195.190.227.221 (195.190.227.221)  15.599 ms
 6  nyk-s1-rou-1001.us.eurorings.net (134.222.231.230)  103.566 ms
 7  nyk-s2-rou-1001.us.eurorings.net (134.222.226.18)  102.136 ms
 8  134.222.248.6 (134.222.248.6)  101.973 ms
 9  ge-1-3-0-0.nyc-64cb-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.47.214)  101.625 ms
10  ge-7-0-0-0.nyc-64cb-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.47.20)  103.419 ms
11  ge-1-0-0-0.chg-64cb-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.43.156)  124.905 ms
12  xe-7-0-3-0.ch1-16c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.159)  124.442 ms
13  ge-3-1-0-0.co1-64c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.118)  184.476 ms
14  ge-4-0-0-0.co2-64c-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.93)  185.815 ms
15  ge-1-2-0-0.wst-64cb-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.43.205)  184.357 ms
16  vlan57.wst-76e-2.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.38)  184.053 ms
17  207.46.36.110 (207.46.36.110)  184.450 ms
18  131.107.200.246 (131.107.200.246)  185.064 ms
19  131.107.200.78 (131.107.200.78)  187.394 ms
20  131.107.201.231 (131.107.201.231)  185.490 ms
21  *
22  *
23  *
24  *

The failing IP addresses in step 19 and 20 are Microsoft's:

whois 131.107.201.231

OrgName:    Microsoft Corp
OrgID:      MSFT
Address:    One Microsoft Way
City:       Redmond
[..]
NetRange:   131.107.0.0 - 131.107.255.255

When testing from another location then the route might be different, and then might not be using those two specific Microsoft servers (hence, taking a route through proxify.com might work, when other more direct routes fail). You can test from many other locations using the list at traceroute.org.