Possibly Blocked by Let’s Encrypt

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Hi Let’s Encrypt Team,

I’m reaching out on behalf of several customers who are reporting that their certificate renewals or registrations are failing when using the IP address 37.44.215.176. They suspect this IP might be blocked or rate-limited by Let’s Encrypt.

The IP belongs to our infrastructure at Prepaid-Host.com, and we’d like to kindly ask if you could verify whether this IP is currently being rate-limited, blocked, or blacklisted by Let’s Encrypt systems. If so, we would appreciate any information regarding the reason or duration, and what steps we might take to resolve it.

Please let us know if you need any further information from our side to investigate.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Best regards,
Christopher Sakel

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The exact symptom of this "block" would be helpful to know. Generally there aren't any IP blocks anymore. Even when there were the symptom is very specific and fairly easy to identify.

What kind of error message do they get from this command?

curl https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory

Also, please know there is a partial outage occurring now which may be interfering. Again, the error they see will help identify the cause. See: https://letsencrypt.status.io/

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Hello @CSakel, welcome. :slightly_smiling_face:

What are the failure messages saying?

How long has this been happening?

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4

Let's Encrypt does rate limit every IP address as described in the documentation (Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt).

Your customers could be encountering the New Registrations per IP Address limit or if your customers renew their certificates at the same time, the Overall Request Limits.

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I'll add to @MaxHearnden helpful comment by saying that Rate Limits will cause a specific error message explaining the specific Rate Limit when the ACME Client request fails. There shouldn't be any doubt to your customer if that is what is happening. As long as whatever ACME Client you use passes along the Let's Encrypt Servers error.

"Blocks" and similar comms issues won't have such messages but these can be debugged too with more info.

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