HELP! My 'What is my IP Address' tool is providing wrong IP address lookup data

hey everyone, really hoping someone can help me out here. i'm completely stuck and it's driving me insane. we recently migrated our pretty popular 'What is my IP Address' tool to a new, supposedly faster server environment. everything looked fine on initial tests, no red flags at all.

but now, users are reporting that the tool is showing completely incorrect or stale IP address lookup information. it's like it's caching old data or, even worse, misidentifying the client's actual IP address. i mean, that totally defeats the whole purpose of the tool, right? i've spent literally hours digging through server configs, checking proxy settings, fiddled with Nginx headers, even tried different methods to correctly get X-Forwarded-For, but still no consistent fix. it's just not working.

here’s a simplified example of what i'm seeing, this is from a client trying to use the tool from outside our network:

// Expected output (example):
// Your Public IP: 203.0.113.45

// Actual output users are seeing (example):
// Your Public IP: 192.168.1.10
// OR
// Your Public IP: 172.31.0.5 (internal server IP)
// OR
// Your Public IP: 52.x.x.x (some random datacenter IP, not the client's)

// Server Log Snippet (simplified):
// [2023-10-27 10:35:01] INFO: Request received from X-Forwarded-For: null
// [2023-10-27 10:35:01] INFO: Detected IP from REMOTE_ADDR: 172.31.0.5

i'm really stuck here, pulling my hair out. has anyone encountered similar issues with IP address detection or IP address lookup after a server migration, especially with web tools designed to show client IPs? any ideas at all would be a lifesaver. thanks in advance!