"Access Denied" Message when accessing steamcommunity.com

[Tiny Gato]

A couple of minutes ago I tried to access the Steam Community through the Steam Overlay browser while I was playing Garry's Mod to enter a Steam Group I was sent the link to, and I got this text that later showed in the address bar saying "access denied".

I thought that was weird, so I decided to tab out of the game and copy-paste the link through my browser, which was when I got a huge white screen with a small text on the top left corner saying:
"Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "https://steamcommunity.com
Reference #18.975add58.1571438535.828f1d37"

Nearly panicked for a second thinking I was banned for some reason, I tried accessing it through my phone's browser to see if it was just an error on my computer, and it got me the same result.

During all this, I could still access the Steam Store and Friends network only through the Steam Launcher on my PC, but not the Steam Community.

I tried looking up what can cause this when accessing Steam, but I found nothing about Steam specifically, but one article on Microsoft's page saying that this can happen when accessing their page when the system thinks there is a Denial-of-Service occurring, so they just block the IP entirely for a certain amount of time. Is this what happened to me? If so how?

TL;DR: Got an "Access Denied. Reference #18.975add58.1571438535.828f1d37" and could not access the Steam Community page for a while. Why does this happen?

Thanks in advance and sorry for long post.

[wuddih]

Originally posted by A Communist Cat:

I tried looking up what can cause this when accessing Steam, but I found nothing about Steam specifically, but one article on Microsoft's page saying that this can happen when accessing their page when the system thinks there is a Denial-of-Service occurring, so they just block the IP entirely for a certain amount of time. Is this what happened to me? If so how?

the same here. Steam thinks you are attacking it and blocked you off. that is broadly an IP-based ban.
this ban is temporary by my experience, in my test scenarios these are 3000 page requests in a 5 minute period.

if you use any extensions, userscripts, botsoftware or other stuff that does automatic stuff for Steam, disable it.

if you share internet connection with other people that you can directly contact, tell them the same. if your isp uses dslite for shared ipv4, talk to your provider.

if your isp has easy method to change ip, you can do so and it should do the job. sometimes power cycling the modem/router can do this too if there is no method to do this manually. we are talking external ip, nothing locally.

sometimes in rare cases, the dns server you are using can trigger this.
using goggles(8.8.8.8) or cloudflares(1.1.1.1) dns servers might help then.

[Tiny Gato]

Originally posted by wuddih:

Originally posted by A Communist Cat:

I tried looking up what can cause this when accessing Steam, but I found nothing about Steam specifically, but one article on Microsoft's page saying that this can happen when accessing their page when the system thinks there is a Denial-of-Service occurring, so they just block the IP entirely for a certain amount of time. Is this what happened to me? If so how?

the same here. Steam thinks you are attacking it and blocked you off. that is broadly an IP-based ban.
this ban is temporary by my experience, in my test scenarios these are 3000 page requests in a 5 minute period.

if you use any extensions, userscripts, botsoftware or other stuff that does automatic stuff for Steam, disable it.

No, I am not using anything other than the browser itself to access Steam.
I do not use any third-party software that does anything.

Originally posted by wuddih:

if you share internet connection with other people that you can directly contact, tell them the same. if your isp uses dslite for shared ipv4, talk to your provider.

if your isp has easy method to change ip, you can do so and it should do the job. sometimes power cycling the modem/router can do this too if there is no method to do this manually. we are talking external ip, nothing locally.

sometimes in rare cases, the dns server you are using can trigger this.
using goggles(8.8.8.8) or cloudflares(1.1.1.1) dns servers might help then.

If those are it, than I'd say it's my provider.
I've had the same ISP for 5 years and this has never occurred before.
I'll take note this and if this is a thing that will repeat itself in the future I'll try to do something about it. Thanks a lot.

[Tiny Gato]

Also, seems a bit weird making a guide on how to avoid an error like this when people access your page on your page while people are having it...
Like what Microsoft did .-.

[Phantom]

The CDN (Akami) also goes bonkers temporarily and you'll see that error.

This occurs now and then, and usually resolves on its own.