HTTP requests met with "Traffic blocked because of exceed per IP shaper session quota..."

Question

I often am met by this message when trying to load a webpage. When I see it, I get nothing else back from my HTTP requests for a couple minutes, after which things go back to normal. There is no correlation to which webpage I'm trying to open. Where is this message coming from? My ISP? How do I fix it?

screenshot

Full text of the message:

Traffic blocked because of exceed session quota.

Traffic blocked because of exceed per IP shaper session quota. Please contact the system administrator. Your session quota is:10000, further traffic will be blocked.

Solution

Yes. This error is most likely coming from your ISP - and you would want to contact them to rectify it. (Alternatively, if you are an employee at a company or similar, it is possible your network administrator has put this limit in place).

Your connection is being temporarily (and automatically) blocked because of what the system deems is excess use - although how exactly it is determining this is not clear. If you are running any P2P applications (ie file sharing), you should stop them, as one [of many] possibilities is they provider is trying to limit your usage because of a large number of simultaneous connections - this is typical filesharing behaviour.

Comments

[Admin]

I have been working on this problem since Friday, December 5. We have experienced it using Comcast and T-Mobile. Tech Support at Network Solutions also got the "Traffic blocked because of exceed session quota" when going to my websites. This suggests it is not an ISP. They are trying to find the cause and source. Notice that the message is not good English. When I learn more, I will report.

[vonbrand]

It could be your ISP, or it could also be the target limiting traffic to one IP (I did see such messages from FTP sites quite frequently in my younger days...).