Mojang authentication issues / network blacklisting?

[Pat James]

I ran an after school event today with 50 student players.  About 2/3 of the students experienced authentication failures using known good passwords I personally setup and tested a few weeks prior.  Even after completing a successful password reset authentication would fail, including on the web site.

Switching from the school's internet connection to a cellular hotspot allowed us to succesffully login, and for a few accounts we managed to switch back to the school's network and get them going.  Then that stopped working too:  the cell connection would work but switching back to the school's network always resulted in failure.  Then after a couple hours, almost at the end of the event, it all started working again.

I guess we tripped a temporary blacklist of the school's IP address.  It was a frustrating experience I would like to avoid in the future.

We were using the retail licenses because we wanted to attract a larger audience for the event by allowing students to bring personal laptops and personal Minecraft licenses.  We have 30 MinecraftEdu licenses and had 30 school laptops setup with the retail Minecraft (in addition to MinecraftEdu) specifically for this event.

I'm thinking it would be nice to run the whole event on MinecraftEdu next time to avoid the authentication issues.  It would mean buying more MinecraftEdu licenses and forgoing the ability to include personal laptops/licenses (students like their skins), but that seems worth giving up to avoid repeating what happened today.

If indeed we triggered a temporary blacklist of the school's IP address, is it possible to get a school's IP whitelisted by Mojang?

-Pat James

[Toni Paavola]

The authentication is sent to: login.minecraft.net over port 443 (HTTPS)

Make sure your network(s) allows connections to this address.

[Pat James]

That's good information to have, thanks Toni.

I'm not sure it would explain what we experienced though given that I successfully logged all of these accounts in over the school network prior to the event, and as the event was ending we were also able to log in.  There were no changes to the school's network during this time.  To me this points to something being done at Mojang, either a blacklist/throttling of the school's IP address, or disruptive maintenance or ephemeral issues with Mojang's authentication system.

-Pat

[Toni Paavola]

You might be right since there would be a lot of authentication requests coming from the same ip address. Not sure how Mojang handles this. You could send them a message here: https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/emails/new?ref=footer

[Pat James]

Thanks, I've filled out their support form and will now wait patiently as they have a backlog of over a week on responding.  I have to say I am fairly unimpressed with the professionalism and quality of Mojang support and account/license management -- these are areas where where I am hopeful Microsoft will improve things.

[Matt Coia]

As you mentioned Pat, this is a perfect reason to be using MinecraftEDU in this situation. And students can still use their own skins if you so choose. 

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[Devyn Larson]

We've been dealing with the same type of authentication issues since December. I've been playing around with our network firewall settings ... Which has helped a bit, but not solved it. Definitely not a long term fix.
My current theory is that Mojang or Microsoft tweaked something, and it's getting blocked as phishing or malware (aka. The firewall seeing the authentication site as something hostile.)
REALLY looking for a fix for this. My team has put in tickets for this as well.

[Matt Coia]

Yes, this is probably an automated setting on their firewall system to eliminate ddos attacks (and rightfully so). They might "be able" to add your IP to their safe list but from a security standpoint, they probably won't want to. 

Even more reason to use MinecraftEDU solely. 

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