In order to serve the correct version of the website for the user’s locale some websites will use the IP addresses of their visitors to determine their location. This can cause problems if the geolocate services used by the website do not have up-to-date databases mapping IPs to their location.

Infrastructure providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP will buy large ranges of IPs and assign them to their regions. However, these ranges are often recycled and previously associated with different regions.

For example, AWS may open a new datacenter in Europe and associate a set of IP ranges to it that were previously registered to regions in North America. If the geolocate services do not regularly update their databases then the IPs will be determined to be associated with incorrect regions. The result is that target websites we test may serve the incorrect locale version.

Some website owners will cache the geolocate databases inside their systems too, which only accentuates the problem as not only does the root service need to be updated but the locally cached databases do too.

To correct this, the website owner must check that the IPs we test from are being detected as being registered in the correct location by their geolocate services. Please speak to your geolocation service provider if their data is out-of-date as we are unable to change IPs which are now allocated to new regions.