Apple Services & App Store Traffic Dropping (client-rst) Across Multi-WAN SD-WAN Setup via Fastly/Akamai CDNs
Hi everyone,
We are experiencing persistent performance degradation and connection drops (client-rst) when downloading apps from the Apple App Store, updating iOS/macOS, or streaming Apple Music across our multi-WAN enterprise environment running FortiGate.
Network Architecture:
- Firewall: FortiGate (Multi-WAN SD-WAN deployment)
- WAN Links: 1 Gbps Fiber, Metro Ethernet, RadioLink
- Clients: macOS and iOS devices across multiple enterprise LANs
The Issue:
During Apple-bound downloads, Apple devices initiate multi-stream parallel connections. While 17.0.0.0/8 traffic matches our designated Apple SD-WAN rules, traffic destined for local/global CDN nodes—specifically Fastly (151.101.x.x) and Akamai (185.158.x.x)—fails to match ISDB / FQDN objects.
As a result, these CDN flows hit our default multi-WAN load balancing rules, splitting packets across different WAN interfaces (port1, port3, port4). This IP switching mid-session breaks SSL/session persistence and triggers action="client-rst" on the FortiGate, resulting in stalled downloads.
