Hacker News Reader

Dropping ICMP traffic isn't super uncommon to try to mitigate low-complexity DoS attacks, I also cannot ping irs.gov.

I can get to www.irs.gov in my browser though.

It's also a great way to introduce hard to debug network issues since PMTUD also relies on ICMP, and is basically mandatory for ipv6.

ICMP (ping) is often blocked and is an unreliable way to tell if a website is up.

HTTPS requests timing out might as easily be something on your end, or your provider.

Do you have a VPN on? A lot of government services block those.

works fine for me... i really doubt the irs website is down

You can't ping irs.gov. It blocks ICMP.