IPv6 is still not supported by major websites

Networking & Firewalls
1

Since I’ve recently begun to enable IPv6 in my home network, I took the opportunity to disable IPv4 on my daily driver PC to see how far I’d come using only IPv6.

To my shock, I didn’t come very far. Let’s be real here, I didn’t expect every site on the internet to be reachable. I know that to many small site administrators, the topic can be daunting. Even the sites and services I host are without exception not IPv6 enabled - yet - (which I want to remedy in the near future) because I simply didn’t care until now.

I did however not expect how many of the big websites / services with hundreds of thousands and millions of users each day are still out there. Like Twitter, Amazon, Stackoverflow, Twitch, Steam, Github, Reddit… It’s crazy! We have 2020, IPv6 has been around for more than 20 years! https://ipv6.watch/ lists even more.

2 Likes
2

I believe WhatsApp media CDNs are not accessible via ipv6 or it was like that recently.

3

Hm, I haven’t tested that, at least WhatsAp Web worked over IPv6 for me. Facebook seems to be doing a good job with their services in that regard.

4

I’m not sure exactly tbh, all I saw from a friend was an advisory that at one point ipv6 wasn’t working , they’ve likely fixed it .

5

Its kinda a chicken and egg problem. There is no demand from consumers so tech companies wont “waste” money on it. On the other hand ISPs are free to deploy CGNAT on a massive scale because the lack of need for IPv6…
(Know this from first hand experience. It was one hack of a roller-coaster ride to get a public IP again.)

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6

I suppose this is somewhat true. On the other hand, how expensive can it be for a large tech company? Sure, requesting /32 or /29 prefixes costs money. But a lot of these service providers already operate autonomous systems with such small prefixes routed to them.

I mean, take Amazon for example. One of the biggest cloud providers in existence, already hosting thousands of IPv6 enabled sites for their customers in their datacentres. Would cost them literally nothing to enable IPv6 for their own website visitors.

7

By the way, there is a really easy way to make your publicly available website or service accessible via IPv6. There are free proxy / cache providers, like Cloudflare, who by sitting between an IPv6 visitor and an IPv4-only server can bridge that gap, making it easy even for small service providers to support IPv6.

8

IIRC they allow backwards compatibility (or did?) through encapsulating ipv4 within ip6.

Ip6 adoption is kind of like the uber highspeed networkstandards. It’s been out for a while but do we see more than 1 gigabit capability on most network devices or integrated into PC’s? Nope…

9

Depends on how old their gear is i guess. Companies are notoriously use anything until its beyond economical repair or it works but its so outdated that it actually causes them to loose money because of it.

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