Long story short; a long time ago (2 years maybe?) I decided to run some relays since I had spare bandwidth. Over the course of about a week I had set up three relays. One of them even got marked as “fast”. Things were good…
…until they weren’t. One day I woke up and noticed I couldn’t access any onion sites at all. Not from any of my computers; not from Windows, not from Linux, not even from Tails. Í reset my modem/router multiple times, restarted the computers multiple times… Still nothing. Then I used my phone’s tethering function and actually got a connection. The Tor network was fine… I just couldn’t access it from my home internet specifically. I switched wifis back and tried again, same result: clearnet is accessible but no Tor. Needless to say I didn’t touch my relays after that… I didn’t even check if they were working or not before I rebooted stuff.
It stayed like that for around two weeks - I had to use my phone’s tether every time I wanted to use Tor, until one day Tor magically became accessible from my home again.
My only guesses are either:
a) I screwed something up and somehow got my IP blacklisted by the Tor network itself, or
b) my ISP saw my relays and decided to shadowban my tor connection because if they openly blocked it then they’d have to explain themselves to the public… and it’s easier to just ban the little guy and watch him run like a chicken with his head cut off desperately trying to fix a problem that can’t be fixed from his side.
I use the term shadowban because if they REALLY didn’t want me to run a relay they could’ve just injected a pop-up ad in my browser like they did that one time they caught me torrenting game of thrones.
So… did anything similar ever happen to any of you guys or am I still the headless chicken two years later?