title: Firebase storage bucket grants access to some countries only but not others
body: <p>I have a Firebase Storage bucket located in <strong>australia-southeast1</strong>. When a user creates an image with my app, that's where the file goes.
  Then the image is supposed to be shareable through a download link obtained with the getDownloadUrl() function (so a valid public link with token is generated).</p>
  <p>However, when I share that link, people from Australia, Asia and US could access it. But users from EU, Canada, North Africa, etc. couldn't. See an example <a href="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/panoroll.appspot.com/o/users%2FwUAAvEv666PpXEemyrLYhAzlYom1%2FNaturalXManmadeLights.jpg?alt=media&amp;token=c0f75d06-13f8-45a7-8f15-11c6066cac3d" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p>
  <p>My guess is that this is because of my bucket's default location. But, I am puzzled since the documentation does not mention any geographic restrictions of this kind and I have not set any specific limitation. It is not even a matter of speed of access, it is just simple access.</p>
  <p>Shall I create multiple buckets in multiple locations and duplicate all the images in all buckets to ensure access independently of the user's location?</p>
  <p><strong>Edit: Details of debugging attempts</strong></p>
  <ul>
  <li>Those who can't access only see a white screen.</li>
  <li>I tried to replicate the issue using VPNs of those countries, and checking the inspector, the console says nothing and for the network part, the GET request gives a '200 Connection established' status but 0 Byte transferred.</li>
  <li>Then I went on and tried to do the GET request from within my app to
  display the image in it. This time, I got in the console a
  '<em>Cross-Origin Request Blocked...(Reason: CORS header
  'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing)</em>' message and still the same
  status in the network tab. The app is able to successfully open the
  image on VPNs of locations that can view it.</li>
  <li>Also, I already checked the CORS configuration in Google Cloud and they look fine and allow
  my app's domain to access to the bucket. I even tried to allow any
  domain (by setting the origin parameter of the CORS to &quot;*&quot;), just to
  see what will happen, but the behaviour remains the same (I don't see
  why it would work for some and not for others anyway).</li>
  </ul>