What is an IP ban, and how do you know if you have one?

Every connection to a website or game server arrives from a public IP address, and the server can refuse connections from any address it likes. An IP ban is exactly that refusal: a rule saying do not serve 203.0.113.42, or a whole range such as 203.0.113.0/24. Unlike an account ban, it does not care who is signed in. New accounts, logged-out visitors and the other people in your house all hit the same wall.

Services use IP bans for three reasons. They stop someone who keeps creating new accounts after each ban (ban evasion). They cut off automated abuse, such as scrapers, credential-stuffing bots and spam sign-ups, which cannot be banned by account because they never had a real one. And they block categories of address wholesale: many sites refuse Tor exits, known VPN ranges or data-center addresses on sight, which is an IP ban you walk into by choosing a network.

A ban can be permanent or timed, applied by a human moderator or by an automatic rule (too many failed logins in ten minutes), and enforced by the service itself or by a protection layer in front of it such as a CDN firewall. Those differences decide how you resolve it.

An IP ban looks different from a slow site or a broken account. The tell-tale symptoms:

• It fails before you sign in. The page will not load at all, shows a bare error such as 403 Forbidden, Access denied, Your IP has been blocked or a never-ending captcha, or a game shows a connection error at the first screen.
• A brand-new account is blocked immediately. You register and are suspended or restricted within minutes, having done nothing.
• Another network works. Switch the same device to mobile data, or try from a friend's connection, and everything is normal. This is the decisive test, because it changes the address and nothing else.
• Everyone at home is affected. Family members with their own accounts and devices get the same error on the same Wi-Fi.
• The timing matches a change of address. Your router rebooted, your provider moved you to a new range, or you connected to a VPN, and the block began then.

If your account works from another network but not from home, the address is the problem. If your account fails everywhere while a new account from home works, the account is the problem, and the fix is an appeal, not a new IP.

Most automatic IP bans are driven by the address's reputation, and you can see most of what the site sees. Run the IP blacklist check to find out whether your address is listed on public abuse lists; a listing for proxies, botnet activity or attacks will get you blocked by firewalls that consult those lists. Then run the IP fraud score, which combines blocklists, VPN and proxy ranges, hosting ranges and attack feeds into one score and shows every reason behind it. A high score from a home connection almost always means the address inherited someone else's history.

Finally, the proxy and VPN checker tells you whether your address is classified as residential, mobile, business, data center, VPN, proxy or Tor. Anything other than residential or mobile is enough for many sites to refuse you without any history at all.

Roblox

Roblox does not publicly document IP bans as a moderation action; what it documents are account warnings, timed suspensions, terminations and creator-issued bans from individual experiences (the ones that show error codes such as 267 and 600). Players report address-level blocks after serious violations and ban evasion, and the symptom is that every account in the household stops working. The only sanctioned route is an appeal through the Roblox Support form under Settings, Help & Safety, Violations & Appeals, within 30 days of the action. Roblox's terms also prohibit using a VPN to hide your location when making purchases.

Discord

Discord server bans are set by that server's moderators and, as moderators and users have reported for years, are enforced against the address the banned account used as well as the account itself. The practical effect is the complaint that fills Discord's feedback forums: a roommate, sibling or dorm-mate on the same connection cannot join a server they were never in. Platform-wide suspensions are separate and come from Discord's Trust and Safety team. For a server ban, only that server's moderators can lift it, and they can do so even if the original ban was for someone else on your network.

Twitch

Channel bans on Twitch are account-level, applied by streamers and their moderators. To catch people who return on fresh accounts, Twitch runs Suspicious User Detection, a machine-learning system that flags likely and possible ban evaders from account signals and hides or marks their chat messages. Twitch does not say which signals it uses. Site-wide suspensions are issued by Twitch itself, and creating a new account to get around one is itself a violation.

Instagram and other Meta apps

Instagram's Action Blocked and We limit how often you can do certain things messages are temporary rate limits tied to the account and to the connection it is using. Registering several accounts from one address in a short time, logging in from data-center or VPN ranges, and automation tools are the common triggers. The blocks usually expire on their own within hours to a few days; a permanent suspension is an account action with its own appeal path inside the app.

An IP ban assumes one address means one person. That assumption is wrong for a large share of the internet:

• Carrier-grade NAT. Mobile networks and many fiber and satellite providers put thousands of customers behind one public address. One spammer behind that address gets everyone banned at once. The CGNAT guide explains how to tell whether you are behind it.
• Dynamic addresses. Your provider reassigns addresses regularly, so today's address may have been used by a bot last week. The ban outlives the offender.
• Campus, office and hotel networks. Hundreds of people share a handful of addresses, and one Discord ban or one scraper on the network blocks the whole building.
• VPNs and Private Relay. You share an exit address with everyone else on that server. Many services ban those ranges pre-emptively; others ban them after one user abuses them.

This is why services that care about getting it right prefer account-level actions and device fingerprinting over address bans, and why the better ones accept appeals from shared-address users.

1. Confirm it is the address. Test from mobile data or another network. If the account works there, continue; if not, appeal the account action instead.
2. Turn off anything that changes your address. Disconnect from VPNs, proxies, Tor and Private Relay and try again. If it works now, the service blocks that range, and the fix is to not use it for that site.
3. Check the address's reputation with the tools above. If it is on a blocklist because of an infected device in your home, clean the device first; the blacklist guide covers removal.
4. Appeal to the service. Explain that the address is shared or was recently assigned to you, give the address from the homepage and the time the block started, and mention the test from another network. Automatic bans by security layers are usually lifted quickly once a human looks.
5. Get a new address legitimately. With a dynamic connection, powering the router off for several hours often yields a different address; the change your IP address guide lists what works per provider. Otherwise ask the provider for a new address or a static one.
6. Wait it out. Many automatic bans expire in hours or days. Hammering the site during that time resets the timer on some systems.

Using a VPN to get around a ban works technically and is where many people stop. Be aware that most services treat it as ban evasion in their terms, that the new account can be linked to the old one by other signals, and that a VPN exit shared with thousands of people is itself the most banned kind of address there is.