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Microsoft Azure datacenter's IP location, shows incorrect location when using IP Geolocation services

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If you have looked up the IP that is assigned to your Microsoft Azure deployments using any of the IP geolocation services then you must have noticed that the IP location and deployment location are shown differently. For example if you have a deployment that is hosted in East US datacenter and when you geo lookup the IP address of this deployment, it might show that the VM is located in Brazil. This is not actually accurate.

 

Microsoft has quite a lot of IP address space, and it is assigned to new clusters as they come online. It can also be re-used later if we decommission services that used a specific block of IP space and want to reuse that IP space somewhere else later.

 

The IP address range that you can download from MSDN is the ultimate authority for where the deployment is located.  If you are using one of the several IP geolocation services, be aware that they are not 100% accurate. These services base their information on where the IP address range is registered from. Registration location does not have much to do with where the IP address is being served from.

 

For instance, there is a range of IP address showing as originating from Brazil using the Geolocation services, however per the downloaded document, this is being served from East US. There are also ranges registered in Redmond that are being served out of the EU. 

 

We have already updated many major geo-location databases to ensure customers do not experience any confusion in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

 

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

 

Related Azure Blog: https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/11/windows-azures-use-of-non-us-ipv4-address-space-in-us-regions/

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2014
    Cool, thanks, That's why Netflix shows brazil terms and conditions, when used from an azure VM. Used that cause it's currently not available in Europe :-)

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2014
    It's now the end of May and the issue still exists.  Is there any workaround?

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2014
    This is causing a problem with a government site we interact with? Any date?

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2014
    Any update on this please. We are getting major pressure to switch all our cloud services, VM's and websites to RackSpace. We need an update asap.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2014
    We are experiencing same problem but from Dublin's Datacenter. We have been assigned with a 137.135.128.0/17 range but most Geolocation sites state that we are from US. This is causing us several problems as some websites won't accept our connection (we run RDS services from Azure). Is there an update on this?

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2015
    Just encountered this issue.  North Europe VM, IP geolocation states US.  This is a big problem if you need to access data from particular sites that restrict access based upon location. Any news / workaround ?.