Help Facebook mapped to loopback ip

[bilbobroccoli]

Hey there,

Somehow www. Facebook.com has been mapped to the loopback IP 127.0.0.1 and I cannot access the site via Chrome, Firefox, or that app Facebook has made.

Chrome gives the "oops!" message, Firefox gives "unable to connect", and the FB app gives something similar.

I installed sw to ping Facebook and it returns the 127.0.0.1 address. FB is not mapped to this address in the hosts file and I am not that familiar with the Android OS enough where else to find this info. I have deleted all the browser caches and reboot the device.
I have uninstalled/reinstalled the FB saw.

Any help would be great, personally I really don't care about FB and all the useless crap people post but I am traveling overseas and it has been my main way to keep in touch with my family and I think there might be a bit of an emergency.

Thanks!!!

 

[John Bean]

It may be blocked in your router or your ISP's blacklist, if you're using automatic settings for DNS lookup.

You could try setting the name server addresses manually on your tablet (from memory I think you need to tap on "advanced" in the network settings) and change the DNS addresses to point at Google's servers - 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 which may help.

It's unlikely that the tablet is doing it unless you have misconfigured a proxy or something - but then you'd know what you had done I would imagine. If all else fails there's always the option of a factory reset...

 

[bilbobroccoli]

Thanks for taking the time to help with my problem.

Im currently in Viet Nam and it appears that sometimes Facebook is blocked and sometimes not....I could access it just fine in Saigon and Nha Trang but can't in Hoi An and Hue.... Two hotels and several restaurants exhibit the same behavior...I have been in countries where websites are blocked but I had never seen it done with the loopback IP. I'm still not 100% positive its not a device issue but I installed a FB proxy app and can access my account.

Thanks again!

 

[John Bean]

Glad I pointed you in the right direction. Trapping DNS requests in a router somewhere and mapping them to loopback is an easy "cheap and cheerful" method of blocking named sites and is quite common in some places.

As you discovered it's not a particularly effective method, more an irritation than anything else.

 

[Daxst3r]

Nexus 7 (Chrome to be exact) also does this annoying thing called "cache redirect", so if you get redirected when a site is down or not accessible, that redirect is permanently stored by Chrome, which then screws up the other browsers too.

It basically means that once your been redirected, you will always be redirected, even if the site/page comes back online.
There are exceptions, but I don't really know all the details.