u/drwat23

Sharing to hopefully help someone else in this situation down the line. The answer ended up being something I'd never dealt with in years of building sites and definitely more on the IT side than web design.

I had a client in Buffalo, NY who couldn't load their new site from their office. They were able to initially see the site when they disconnected from the office wifi, so I assumed the issue was with their network. I could see the site fine in another state and had other people verify in other states as well, and could confirm via analytics that the site was receiving traffic. But soon, they couldn't see the site from their home, and someone else in the area also confirmed the site was getting blocked.

We ran the domain through whatsmydns.net and saw the correct records US-wide except for NY (where the client was). We found out that both parties who couldn't access the site were on Spectrum. So we realized Spectrum was blocking the site in that area.

We filled out Spectrum's form to unblock the site and got an auto-response that denied the unblocking and said the site had potentially harmful content. So I needed to get someone on the phone.

**Dealing with Spectrum Support:**

The initial tech support rep I spoke to did not want to escalate this. One rep literally suggested we rebuild the website. I had to keep repeating that this is not a website issue or a device issue, and that we needed to escalate to the network/security team. I stayed polite but clear. Got the "I'm the highest supervisor you can speak to" line — I knew that wasn't right because of their suggestion to rebuild the site — so I just kept escalating. I phrased it as "we need to figure out a solution, whether that's speaking directly to someone with a technical understanding or involving legal — I'm not sure what path to take and need your help." I think adding in "legal" helped escalate.

Eventually I got a manager who was very honest and said he hadn't seen this problem before, and he pulled in someone more technical.

He got back to me the next day and explained that Spectrum uses Security Shield to block "dangerous" sites, and it works off third-party threat databases. They showed us virustotal.com — you paste in a URL and ~92 security vendors give it a verdict. Our domain was flagged by four of them (Fortinet as "Phishing," plus alphaMountain, ADMINUSLabs, and CRDF as "Malicious"). Spectrum's stance: we mirror those vendors and can't manually override this, so you'll need to reach out to them to get the site cleared.

I did some digging and found that even though the client had just bought the domain last year, it had been created over 15 years ago and gone through different registrants, which could have caused it to get flagged/blacklisted on those security sites. Nothing to do with the site I built or the DNS records I set up — just the domain's history.

**How we fixed it:**

Each vendor has a false-positive dispute process. I submitted to all four with the same short description: domain re-registered under new ownership on [date], legitimate business, valid SSL, old flags belong to a previous registrant, please review.

I was worried about these vendors taking weeks to respond or getting ignored entirely, but they were all fast — the flags got removed the same evening. I reran the domain through VirusTotal and saw they were all cleared, then checked Spectrum's verification tool and confirmed the block was lifted. Checked with the client the next day and the site works for them!

**If this is happening to you:**

1. Site works in some regions/networks but not others → have someone affected try cellular data. If it loads, it's DNS/ISP-side, not your site.
2. Check whatsmydns.net — a red X on one resolver while everything else is green was our clue.
3. Ask every affected person what ISP they have. If it's all the same one, there's your answer.
4. Run the domain through virustotal.com. If any vendors flag it, that's probably feeding the ISP's block. (That's what Spectrum uses, but find out what your ISP with the issue uses.)
5. Dispute directly with each flagging vendor — don't wait for the ISP to fix it, their support mostly can't.
6. When buying or inheriting an aged domain: check VirusTotal and the Wayback Machine BEFORE launch.

I don't have a significant IT background and welcome anyone with more experience and expertise to weigh in, but I wanted to share what worked in case anyone else runs into this.