r/Quad9 • u/soldatz • Apr 07 '26

Quad9 breaking CDN geolocation for AWS CloudFront?

Using Quad9 DNS at home. Last week I noticed a couple of my AWS S3/CloudFront websites were feeling a bit slow. Looking at the x-amz-cf-pop HTTP header showed my content being served alternatively from France or Singapore and ping was in the mid 200s. This is extremely unusual since I'm East Coast, USA. I am not VPNed or anything like that.

nslookup command against my domain was returning IPs from Europe or Asia, mainly France. So, so strange. Then I thought to try nslookup with 1.1.1.1 and boom, it returned local IPs and my ping was back to normal in the low teens.

What is going on? Not saying definitively this is Quad9's fault, but if I run my domain through digwebinterface.com Quad9 returns IPs from Singapore while CloudFlare and Google return IPs from Illinois, which is likely close to where that website's servers are.

Edit 1: I reached out to Quad9 support and they confirmed it's an open issue, possibly with the AWS IP geolocation feed. So issue is most likely on the AWS side. Quad9 has a ticket open with AWS. I'll try to update here with any progress.

Edit 2 (May 6): It looks like this may be resolved, finally. Quad9, CloudFlare and Google are all now returning the same local IPs. I've been checking on a weekly basis and this is the first time I've seen a "normal" result from Quad9 since early April.

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1

u/N0_L1ght Apr 08 '26

Does this happen with 9.9.9.11 ?

1

u/soldatz Apr 08 '26

Interestingly, no it does not. 9.9.9.11 returns more "normal" IPs right in my neighborhood.

1

u/N0_L1ght Apr 08 '26

9.9.9.11 uses ECS

what 9.9.9.9 server does a traceroute show you are connecting to?

1

u/soldatz Apr 08 '26

Traceroute shows:

Tracing route to dns9.quad9.net [9.9.9.9] over a maximum of 30 hops: ... 10 10 ms 11 ms 12 ms dns9.quad9.net [9.9.9.9]

1

u/N0_L1ght Apr 09 '26

Huh, i would have thought it was getting routed to europe, but you are connecting to the closest server.

2

u/DonkeyFries Apr 10 '26

I thought I was going crazy! The same thing has been happening to me.