I think the problem may be bigger and not only restricted to Google's advertisements.
There were other problems, but everything in this specific instance was related to Google services, no other companies should have been affected.
The past month I encountered about 5 clients who had the same sort of problem with their websites hosted on servers in the US - and on different IP addresses.
This is probably a different issue. Since February, we have been on our own IP address ranges, which were new allocations from Afrinic:
105.224.0.0/14
105.228.0.0/15
Unfortunately, under 105.0.0.0/8, there are some ranges allocated to Nigeria, Kenya, and other 419-type countries, and it seems some networks/providers/sites have blocked the whole /8 or large parts of it.
I have personally tried to contact some sites/organisations that do this, to no effect.
We do no blocking/firewalling of any kind on our customers' connections to the internet.
They all reported that they could not access their websites from a Telkom line, but it is working fine when they access from other networks.
So, that makes it our mistake, when we can trace route up to the 2nd last hop (usually the firewall)?
The problems appears to come and go, but one client of mine experienced his site down for the whole week last week when trying to access via Telkom.
He could have logged a ticket with us, in which case we would have requested that he log a ticket with his site's hosting company. In the event they claim there is no problem, we can assist in troubleshooting, but in 100% of the cases so far, it has been the remote side's firewalls having some ancient over-ambitious rules.
I can't help but wondering whether Telkom is in the process of testing some kind of firewall that will enable them to cut down internet access to certain parts of the Internet / world should they ever need to.
No ISP needs a firewall for that, black-hole'ing the destination network on the edge router is trivial.
Please, less of the Telkom conspiracy theories, let's try with some facts and actual technical diagnosis (starting with a traceroute).
