====== Who took the Internet Yesterday? ======

===== Well, who is NOT responsible? =====

  * Not the ministry of telecommunications, ...

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  * Nor our local ISPs 

أشارت "أوجيرو" عبر حسابها على "تويتر"، الى انه "طرأ عطل تقني على عدد من المواقع الإلكترونية الكبرى وشبكة الانترنت العالمية مما أثر على خدمة الانترنت المحلية.

  * Neither some science fiction star ;)

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===== Facebook was suffering =====

To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms (extract from https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/).

===== Since it is about DNS and BGP, this became very serious =====

A great article featuring a clear explanation of the basics: https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/.

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===== And if you need to become experts in BGP, peering, and Internet Infrastructure =====

There is a wonderful course coming next semester called Internet Ecosystem and Evolution, ... Shame on me.

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===== Hey, but Facebook and co. is not the Internet =====

You are right, we were having online courses yesterday, sending emails, watching youtube and netflix videos, and all was fine! The internet is a network of networks (as such, is a very robust infrastructure). Facebook is //just one// service.
 
Yes, but Facebook contributes to a huge part of the Internet trafic (as seen on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange Point): Look at the drop in traffic at the right part of the graph.

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Human behaviour can also be funny: with repeated tries to load the same pages, we now have a surge in DNS requests (as noted by Cloudflare servers).

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===== What is the problem of being largely dependent on one service? =====

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We are definitely living in a guilded age of big tech.

  * https://www.somo.nl/how-big-tech-is-becoming-the-government/
  * https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/is-big-tech-too-powerful-ask-google.html


===== The (day after) explanation from inside is not less hilarious =====

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/

===== Some (very) good references to understand what (technically) happened =====

  * https://radar.qrator.net/blog/giants_fall_aftershock
  * https://www.bortzmeyer.org/facebook-octobre-2021.html
  * https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/
  * https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
  * https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/