Minecraft – bogus minecraft authentication servers down for maintenance error

Some folks use VPS servers to try and 'crack' all kinds of authentication servers, including Mojang's. They're not really interested in Minecraft accounts beyond learning of an email / password pair that might work for other (more important) things like gmail.

It's not unlikely that the previous 'owner' of your VMs IP was engaged in those sort of shenanigans, and that Mojang inserted a firewall rule on their side to stop the abuse.

If that is the case:

• Contact Mojang. Tell them you just bought a new VPS and it can't connect to their authentication server.
• Be ready to back up that claim - keep the welcome email the host sent you
• If all fails, try explaining this to your host, and ask for an IP from a different block

SSH to the VM first and try pinging / traceroute to the auth server, include this information when you contact Mojang.

When you get a shiny new VM, you also (unfortunately) inherit all of the bad behavior that might have been coming from the IP it was assigned - once in a while you have to play the it ain't me game to get stuff working again.

I figured this out after nearly an hour of much more complicated answers, so to be fair, this is a mistake on my end and probably won't help many other people. Probably. I'd still ask that you try this if you're having trouble. It might just help. All it was was an unset DNS server. Make sure you have (a) DNS server(s) set.