For some reason, neither my wife nor I can access Facebook on our home computers. When we try, we get a message similar to “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at www.facebook.com”. Our ISP is Hughesnet, if that matters. We can go to any other website without problems–I’m typing this on my laptop on the home network.
I know we were both able to get to Facebook yeterday, and I might have even done so this afternoon before going out for a few hours.
I’ve run a virus scan–no threats detected. Tried to use the troubleshooter thingy in my " Network and Sharing Center"–message said it could not detect/fix the problem.
I can access Facebook on my phone, as long as I use my dataplan–which goes through a different company than our ISP.
I know we were both able to get to Facebook yeterday
Any ideas on what is causing this, or how to fix it?
Go into your router’s set up pages and see if you can find a page with a field called “primary DNS address.” It is usually on a page called something like Internet Connection Type or WAN Connection. (If you can’t find it, post your router brand and model.)
Write down what’s in your Primary DNS Address. Replace it with “8.8.8.8”. On most routers, you will have to click a button that says something like “save changes” or “update.” Some brands of routers may make you reboot the router next.
See if that makes a difference. If it doesn’t, then change it back. If it does, I’ll tell you what to do next.
I found the user guide for your router on this page:
The images in the user guide that they posted are fuzzy, so I can’t really read a lot of the page headings. But the critical information is in Chapter 3: Advanced Configuration. It would appear there is a tab called Setup and under that there is a sub-tab called Basic Setup.
In Basic Setup, scroll down until you see the heading Internet Setup. If the first field there is anything except “Automatic Configuration – DHCP” you will see three fields called DNS 1, DNS 2, and DNS 3. Change DNS 1.
If the field was “Automatic Configuration – DHCP” then scroll down to the next section which is Network Setup. There you will find three fields called Static DNS 1, Static DNS 2, and Static DNS 3. Change Static DNS 1.
Then at the very bottom of the page is a button called “Save settings.” Click that.
If it prompts you to reboot the router, click yes or OK or whatever.
Then go back to one of your computers and try to access facebook. If it doesn’t work, reboot your computer (or in an administrator level command prompt window type “ipconfig /flushdns” if you know how to do that) and try again. If that doesn’t fix it, then change your router back to what it was originally.
Great. Here’s the story. When you type in something like www.facebook.com, your computer has to figure out from the name of the web site where facebook.com is actually located on the internet in order to communicate with it. It usually does this by sending a message to a DNS service that says “Where is facebook.com located?” And the server replies with an IP address.
Normally, your ISP provides DNS servers to do that job. 99.9% of people just use the default DNS server provided by their ISP. The nice folks over at google provide an alternate set of DNS servers. I told you to try using one of the google DNS servers. The disadvantage of using the google DNS servers is that the messages may have to travel a longer distance than to the local DNS servers your ISP provides and may slow down your internet access. This may or may not be noticeable.
The fact that this fixed your problem tells me that there is something screwed up with your ISP’s DNS servers. With it affecting facebook, I don’t understand why they are not getting thousands of phone calls complaining that facebook is broken. I do know that if you do not know how to directly communicate with their highest-level tech support, you will have zero success in convincing them that their DNS servers are broken. If you call and complain, the front-line and even the second-level tech support will just have you make sure your computer is plugged in and reset your router to factory specs, none of which will help (unless your computer is not actually plugged in!).
I would suggest you wait a few weeks and restore your old router settings and see if they have fixed their problem.
Have you tried power cycling the router? I know it seems odd but I have had Linksys routers (before they merged with Cisco) that would randomly block certain webpages on all computers on the network. Drove me nuts, I’d call the businesses asking why their sites were down and they were confused. Power cycling fixed it…phasing out my Linksys gear fixed it better.
Anytime a few minutes of poking around does fix a network problem, I power cycle the router and modem (and anything else). It only takes about a minute and solves a lot of problems. If that fixes it and it keeps coming back, it might be time for a new router. IME, Linksys routers (again, the pre-Cisco ones that I had) would stop working reliably after a few years.
That’s good, sort of, it at least means the problem is (most likely) confined to your house and not not a DNS server.
It’s odd that changing the DNS server in your router worked…for a while, then stopped working again. You could change it to 8.8.4.4, that’s another Google DNS server.
ETA, but that probably won’t work if giving your browser that actual IP address still didn’t work. Can I safely assume that no one else in your house would be messing with the router or HOSTS file?
ETA2. New idea, clear the cache/history on your browser. Go to the settings for your browser find that area, in the search bar type Facebook, and delete everything that shows up. I’ll bet that’s the problem. (Well, maybe not since it’s a problem for all the computers, but try it anyways).
The fact that it resolved the IP to facebook but still wouldn’t go is bothering me. Try that.
How do you feel about doing a factory reset on the router? If you didn’t do any real customization to it, all you’ll really have to do to it is set the SSID, security type and password back to what they were and everything should just reconnect.
I didn’t do any customization beyond the 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4 thing mentioned above. Everything else is, or should be, factory default
I did google as you suggested…seem to be a hughesnet problem. I was able to get in to www.beta.facebook.com, which is fine for checking my feed, but no good for my wife, who wishes to play her games…several of which are the insidious “must play every day” to suceed types.