Semi-related, I was searching for some hyper specific job related technical cybersecurity stuff a few weeks ago and the first result with the verbatim error message was a reddit post, so i clicked. No dice, loads a reddit branded error page. My employer has their own ARIN number/ASN. As far as i could tell every connection from an IP in one of our blocks was being blocked by reddit. My employer isn’t a faang type tech company, they don’t work in ai, they don’t scrape content for datasets or anything else. I can’t figure out why kind of business would cut off entire swaths of customers from accessing their site during the workday, a prime “take a shit and dick around on the phone” audience. I’ve just made a point to search with stack exchange site dorks since then.
Saying they banned VPNs isn’t completely, technically correct I’d guess. If I were another country then VPN’d in to my house, I would probably be fine. A pedantically correct statement would be that they banned known VPN IP ranges, so if you’re attempting to connect while your traffic is routed through one you get blocked.