Time Capsule (4th Gen) Not Connecting to Some Apple Sites/Servers

[rdizzy]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum, but not new to the site or tech. As the subject states, for some reason, I am being blocked from seeing certain sites or having iMessage work properly (synching and non-delivery). I have tried on both regular and 5GHz networks.

It started a few days ago from out of nowhere when my wife noticed she was not able to send or receive iMessages through Messages app on our laptop. I spent over an hour on the phone with Apple support where they ran me through things like checking for spyware, resetting the NVRAM, etc. While on this call, the support worker tried to get me to go to ara.apple.com and the site wouldn't ever load. I tried other sites:

icloud.com — does some initial loading where I see the loading indicator spinning and the gradient background, but the only thing that comes up after a few mins is an error message saying "ERROR: The Apple Auth widget failed to load"

ara.apple.com — Chrome just tells me that it's connecting, but then times out after a while

Messages app — I removed my Apple ID associated to my account from the Messages app and tried to reconnect it. After submitting, the indicator will spin for a LONG time and then I will eventually be delivered an error saying something like "Error establishing connection to server"

iforgot.apple.com — Chrome just tells me that it's connecting, but then times out after a while

itunesconnect.apple.com — does some initial loading (like icloud.com) where I see the loading indicator spinning and the gradient background, but that's all it does. No error message is ever delivered.

iTunes - View My Account — does not load and only presents a white screen in the application

URLs that seem to work fine — apple.com, discussions.apple.com, beatsbydre.com, iTunes store

I pulled my old Airport Extreme out of storage, mimicked all settings from the TC, test and all sites loaded and everything worked fine on all devices. A couple things I did notice is that the IPv4 address is different on each device, as well as the mac address (obviously).

I've done a bunch of hunting around and checked my IP address against blackholes, as well as on SpamRATS, but everything came up fine.

What I've come to assume is either the Time Capsule IP or mac address is being blocked Apple's servers, or I should call my ISP to see if they can somehow assign me a new IP.

Also, I have read some posts saying that this is potentially caused by a double/duplicate NAT, but there is only 1 router on my small network, and I am not running the TC in bridge mode. I ran a Traceroute on icloud.com and this is what it returned:

Traceroute has started…

traceroute: Warning: icloud.com has multiple addresses; using 17.167.146.43
traceroute to icloud.com (17.167.146.43), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
1 10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1) 1.094 ms 0.621 ms 0.651 ms
2 10.83.128.1 (10.83.128.1) 7.721 ms 7.746 ms 8.192 ms
3 69.50.160.1 (69.50.160.1) 131.012 ms 10.305 ms 10.347 ms
4 172.103.255.101.cipherkey.com (172.103.255.101) 127.608 ms 9.038 ms 9.538 ms
5 66.51.143.33.vrt.2tp.static.cipherkey.com (66.51.143.33) 10.596 ms 9.054 ms 9.395 ms
6 204.101.5.61 (204.101.5.61) 9.841 ms 8.897 ms 10.615 ms
7 core2-vancouver_9-1-0.net.bell.ca (64.230.123.250) 13.492 ms 15.618 ms 15.944 ms
8 tcore4-seattle_hundredgige0-5-0-0.net.bell.ca (64.230.79.94) 13.585 ms 12.573 ms 16.069 ms
9 bx5-seattle_bundle-ether8.net.bell.ca (64.230.125.247) 13.708 ms 18.626 ms 13.308 ms
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * * ​

(It never connected and I noticed the closest thing to my IP address is line 3)

I even thought that maybe there was a conflict with 2 devices having the same IP address on the network, but I disconnected everything except the laptop and the issue persisted.

Has anyone heard of this issue before, especially with a specific set of servers coming for a single company?

Devices:
Mid-2012 MBPR
- macOS Sierra 10.12.2
- Latest versions of Chrome and Safari

iPhone 6's
- Latest versions of iOS

 

[Geeky Chimp]

So, it could be a PMTU issue on your Internet Connection. Is your TC acting as your main router and connecting to an ISP modem/router using PPPoE?
To test try
ping -g 1444 -G 1508 -c 2 -h 1 -D ara.apple.com .
Once you start getting Fragmentation Needed errors you can select the last one to work, add 28 to that value and use that as your MTU on your Router WAN interface.

 

[rdizzy]

So, it could be a PMTU issue on your Internet Connection. Is your TC acting as your main router and connecting to an ISP modem/router using PPPoE?
To test try
ping -g 1444 -G 1508 -c 2 -h 1 -D ara.apple.com .
Once you start getting Fragmentation Needed errors you can select the last one to work, add 28 to that value and use that as your MTU on your Router WAN interface.

They aren't using PPPoE to my knowledge. It has always been set up as DHCP.
I tried pinging but it just timed out over and over.

Overall Update:
I spoke with Apple for 90 mins yesterday and they think the router is shot, but I still doubt that's the case since it's such a targeted issue.

I also spoke with my ISP yesterday and requested to see if they could reassign me an IP. Waiting to hear back.

 

[rdizzy]

Update:
I left the TC unplugged overnight and all day today (besides when I plugged it in to test what Geeky Chimp suggested) and used the old AirPort Express instead. I plugged in the TC about half an hour ago and just tested on all of the URLs that were causing issues, and it's working perfectly.

I don't know if this was something that was fixed on the ISP end since they never got back to me, or if the router just needed some time to itself. Anyway, I'll take it.