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Lately I have trouble accessing twitch.tv on any of my browsers and devices. Google Chrome gave me DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN so I looked up on... Google and most articles told me to change my DNS. I went on changing DNS on every devices that I'm using to Google DNS. But it only worked on my phone which is Android. My computers, however, didn't work. After seatching around, I figured that Twitch doesn't support IPv6. So I went to Network and Sharing Center (Windows 10) to disable IPv6 protocol and Twitch is accessible again.

IPv6 has always been activated on my computer. Is there any problem if I disable IPv6 on my computer? If there is problems then what should I do to tackle this issue?

ps: I didn't know that my ISP support IPv6 until this problem occur :v.

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Bill
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1 Answers1

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Twitch doesn't support IPv6

Generally that doesn't need workarounds. Your computer won't just "use IPv6" for every site; it needs to know the website's IPv6 address first (the two protocols have fully separate addresses).

But websites which don't support IPv6 simply don't publish any IPv6 address in DNS – so there's nothing for your computer to try. When it only knows the IPv4 address, it only uses IPv4, no problems whatsoever.

(As an example, you're posting this on superuser.com which doesn't support IPv6 either.)

Much more likely is one of these:

  • Your DNS server rejects all requests for IPv6 addresses (for AAAA records). That violates the protocol – if the domain exists but is IPv4-only, the correct response is "success" with no data (zero records of that type).

  • The website supports IPv6 but your own IPv6 connection is broken, perhaps due to technical problems at your ISP's side. Check out a few "IPv6 test" websites.

  • The website supports IPv6, but is simply unreachable at this moment due to technical problems. (Separate addressing means separate routing, it's always possible that v4 and v6 connections take completely different paths.)

  • The website did support IPv6 at some point and published its IPv6 address; but then disabled IPv6 support and forgot to remove the address from DNS. That happens, but very unlikely for professionally managed sites like Twitch.

  • The website doesn't support IPv6, but you use a "DNS64" DNS server which returns fake IPv6 addresses for NAT64 (a mechanism for v4/v6 translation)... and your ISP's NAT64 relay is broken. This is very unlikely, and doesn't match the error message you demonstrated.

In general, disabling IPv6 temporarily won't cause problems. Since many clients are IPv4-only to this day, all popular websites have to accept IPv4 as well – many of them are dualstack IPv4/v6, but you won't find a website that requires IPv6 to be used.

But it is a fairly crude workaround; I wouldn't keep it disabled for too long – just out of principle. I would suggest trying to find out the actual source of the problem, whether it's in your router or your ISP.

grawity
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