403 forbidden when accessing Zoopla.co.uk - Netherlands data centre

Question

_{Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:54 AM}

Hi, 

Please excuse me if I am posting in the wrong forum, I am relatively new to Azure and MS IT forums in general but I am stuck and any help would be greatly appreciated!

I have a VM setup for hosted desktop use and it is currently residing in West Europe (Netherlands -data centre) and my problem is that it is used by a property management company that frequently access the zoopla.co.uk property website. Since yesterday users are receiving a 403 forbidden http error when attempting to access the site.

I have tested other Azure VMs residing in different geographic locations and all can access without error, therefore the problem seems to reside with the geographic location.

I have restarted the VM from the portal in order to renew the IP address and eliminate a blocked IP but this did not resolve. When setting a public proxy in a different location access is no problem.

any ideas or known issues out there pls???

All replies (2)

_{Wednesday, February 17, 2016 11:37 AM ✅Answered | 2 votes}

I just want to chime in on this problem. We have encountered it with a server located on an Ireland IP address. After speaking with Zoopla directly they have informed me that they are blocking IP ranges from Azure.

Thank you for your email.

I got informed that Azure services were blocked because
of serious traffic abuse to zpg. ie. lots and lots of traffic from Microsoft
Azure cloud services, symptomatic of web crawling or abuse. We filed an abuse
complaint to Microsoft and we are waiting for a response from them.

Until we hear back from them unfortunately they will
remain blocked due to the nature of the above issue.

So this is likely why you are getting this error. I am checking with them further about this issue.

_{Thursday, January 21, 2016 7:58 PM | 1 vote}

Hello,

Greetings!

We are pleased to answer the query. With regards to your query, could you please provide the complete error message and what is the VM status in the portal, also are you able to access the VM? We would appreciate if you can check and confirm. This will help us to answer your query.

Best Regards,

Kamalakar K