Over the past week, Windscribe on my Windows laptop stopped connecting to anything except Mumbai "Old Spice". I'm in the UAE on e& (Etisalat). I've spent a morning isolating it and want to check whether others are seeing the same thing, and whether any UK locations still work for anyone.
Setup
- Windscribe 2.24.13, Windows 11
- e& network, ISP DNS 213.42.20.20 / 195.229.241.222
- Anti-censorship: Protocol Tweaks enabled, Server Routing tried on both Auto and Alternate, AmneziaWG presets A, E, F and I all tried
Results (WireGuard/AmneziaWG, IKEv2, OpenVPN UDP/TCP, Stealth and WStunnel, ports 443/80/53)
| Location | IP ranges | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Mumbai – Old Spice | 165.231.255.x, 196.196.98.x | Connects on every protocol |
| Edinburgh – Keeper Willie | 185.3.237.x, 166.0.9.x, 193.36.118.x | Fails on every protocol |
| London – Biscuits / Crumpets | 166.0.9.x, 185.141.57.x, 185.164.138.x | Fails |
| Frankfurt – Wurstchen / Sausage Party | 166.0.9.x | Fails |
| New Delhi – Chole Bhature | 194.122.87.x | Fails |
| Kuala Lumpur – Perdana | 194.122.87.x | Fails |
| Fake Mumbai – Mayanagri | 85.199.255.x | Fails |
| Lagos – Lekki | 150.241.139.x | Fails |
On WireGuard there's no handshake response at all. On WStunnel the failing locations never return "Successfully connected to remote server", while Mumbai returns it in under a second.
Why I think it's IP-range blocking rather than protocol detection
With the app closed:
Test-NetConnection 185.3.237.211 -Port 443succeeds, so the TCP connection to Edinburgh opens.curl -vk https://166.0.9.226/(Edinburgh) sends its TLS Client Hello and gets no reply until it times out.- The same curl to
196.196.98.58(Mumbai) completes the TLS handshake normally. - A control test to
192.0.2.1:443fails, so the network isn't answering connections on servers' behalf.
That test sends no SNI and isn't VPN traffic at all, yet it's still dropped for Edinburgh and not for Mumbai. So it looks like e& is dropping traffic to specific Windscribe ranges once data starts flowing, and no protocol or obfuscation setting can get around that. Note that it isn't "India works": New Delhi fails too. The line seems to be by IP range, not country.
Garry confirmed it's ISP filtering but wouldn't escalate.
Questions
- Is anyone else in the UAE on e& seeing the same? Is du any different for you?
- Has anyone found UK locations (or any non-India ones) that still connect from e&?
- Has anyone tried a UK Static IP from the UAE recently? Did it survive, or get blocked too?
Redacted debug log: https://pastebin.com/V0FWXNdp
Source: r/Windscribe · by /u/Additional-Diver-451