Table of Contents
Who took the Internet Yesterday?
Well, who is NOT responsible?
- Not the ministry of telecommunications, …
- 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 ;)
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/.
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.
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.
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).
What is the problem of being largely dependent on one service?
We are definitely living in a guilded age of big tech.