Your IP Has Been Banned: What It Means & How to Fix It

What Does "Your IP Has Been Banned" Mean?

It means the website refused requests coming from your IP address, the number every site sees when you connect. The decision was made by the site, or by a security service the site sits behind, not by your internet provider or your browser.

Cloudflare puts it plainly for its error 1006: "A Cloudflare customer blocked traffic from your client or browser." (Cloudflare) OVHcloud's shared web hosting shows the same words when "the IP address from which you are trying to access your website has been temporarily blocked by our security systems". (OVHcloud)

The ban is on the address, not on your account or your device. That matters, because many addresses are shared, and the person the site meant to stop may not be you.

Where You See It: The Common Versions

The wording changes with whoever blocked you. Each version shows something you can quote when you ask to be let back in.

Why Websites Ban IP Addresses

A ban is usually a rule doing its job, not a person reading your messages. These are the common rules:

• Too many requests or failed logins in a short time. fail2ban, a common server tool, ships with a default that bans an address after 5 failures within 10 minutes. OVHcloud's first cause is when "a very large number of requests, similar or not, are made in an extremely short time from the same IP address".
• Requests that look suspicious, such as scanning for admin pages or known exploits (OVHcloud names suspicious requests as a cause).
• A range, network or country the site blocks. Cloudflare's IP Access rules let a site block by single address, address range, network (ASN) or country.
• A VPN, proxy or data-centre address. Detection services describe hosting and data-centre addresses, VPN services included, as "likely to be used as anonymizers", and some sites block them all.
• Someone else on the same address: on a shared mobile or carrier-grade NAT address, one user's behaviour gets everyone on it blocked (below).
• An address on a public blocklist, which mostly matters to mail servers, though some sites use the same lists. The IP Blacklist Checker asks 28 of them; our Spamhaus removal guide walks through the best-known one.

Is It You, or Everyone on Your Address?

Phone networks and many home providers put lots of customers behind one public address, using carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT). The address space reserved for it is 100.64.0.0/10 (RFC 6598): if your router reports a WAN address starting with 100.64 to 100.127, you are sharing your public address.

The IETF wrote down the consequence in 2011. A server that sees too many requests from one address "may decide to put that address in a penalty box", and on a shared address "one user who fails a number of login attempts may block out other users who have not made any previous attempts". (RFC 6269)

So a ban you did nothing to earn is common, and it is not a judgement of you. Check what the site sees with What Is My IP, which network the address belongs to with IP Lookup, and whether it is on a public blocklist:

How Long Does an IP Ban Last?

It depends entirely on who set it and how:

Automatic bans are often short. fail2ban's shipped default is bantime = 10m, ten minutes, though sites change it, and its own bad-bot rule bans for 48 hours. OVHcloud calls its hosting bans temporary.

A rule the owner set by hand lasts until the owner removes it. Cloudflare is clear that its support "cannot override a customer's security settings": only the site owner can lift a block they made.

If the page still shows the ban after an hour or so, assume it is a lasting one and move on to asking the site.

How to Get Unbanned

Go through these in order. Each one is something a site can act on.

1. Wait, then try onceIf you were refreshing hard or mistyped a password several times, an automatic ban may be over in minutes. Hammering the page meanwhile is exactly what these rules look for.
2. Turn off your VPN or proxyIf you are on one, the ban may be on its shared address, not on yours. Load the site again on your own connection. The VPN Test shows which address sites see.
3. Note the reference and your addressCopy the Cloudflare Ray ID, or OVHcloud's IP, date and Request ID, plus your address from What Is My IP and the time it happened.
4. Ask the site to check itUse the site's contact or support page and include the reference. Cloudflare's own resolution for this error reads: "Request the website owner to investigate their Cloudflare security settings or allow your client IP address."
5. Check the address for problemsIf your address is on a blocklist, a device on your network may be sending spam or malware traffic: clean it up first, then follow each list's own removal steps.

If You Run the Website

When a visitor sends you a reference, you can find the exact request. Every request through Cloudflare gets a Ray ID, and Security Events list each one with its "IP address, user agent, ASN". (Cloudflare) Search them for the visitor's Ray ID or IP address: in Cloudflare's words, "The event shows which security feature and rule blocked the request." (Cloudflare)

On a server running fail2ban, lift a ban from one jail or from all of them:

# from one jail
sudo fail2ban-client set sshd unbanip 203.0.113.7
# from every jail
sudo fail2ban-client unban 203.0.113.7

If your site is on OVHcloud web hosting and you are the one seeing the page, OVHcloud asks you to open a support ticket with the IP address, date and Request ID from the page, the URL and your browser.