Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21)

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 11:41
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

If you don't know already, there's currently a major outage throughout the world for many websites due to some 'fault' at a major data centre provider. This includes many major websites, like Amazon, many newspapers, social media (I noted that Disqus is down), etc, including, ironically, the website Isitdownrightnow which monitors web pages to see if they have a fault.

No doubt the MSM and certain other elements will now be speculating that this is a 'hack' or similar by 'rogue nations', Russia bots' etc, etc, before any actual verifiable evidence emerges.

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 11:46
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - daveyjp

Understand its an AWS problem.

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 11:50
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

Understand its an AWS problem.

What's AWS when it's at home? I'm reasonably up on computers, but not that much. :-)

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 12:01
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Falkirk Bairn

AWS = Amazon

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 12:22
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

AWS = Amazon

You mean them as a web server/hosting service? Rather a good indicator that Amazon should not be the effective monoply web server service they appear to be, especially with the furore earlier in the year when they made politically-based moves to deplatform certain social media at short notice.

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Tue 8 Jun 2021 22:12
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - alan1302

No doubt the MSM and certain other elements will now be speculating that this is a 'hack' or similar by 'rogue nations', Russia bots' etc, etc, before any actual verifiable evidence emerges.

Nope - at least not anything I've read about it.

Edited by alan1302 on 08/06/2021 at 22:16

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 11:40
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Bromptonaut

Seems to be down to a failure in a switching/hosting service provided by one of those massive companies you've never heard of.

It's possible it was a hack. We don't know yet and even if evidence is found the extent to which it is verifiable may be disputed.

More worrying is the fact that one link drops the whole chain for an extended period of time.

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 12:11
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

Seems to be down to a failure in a switching/hosting service provided by one of those massive companies you've never heard of.

It's possible it was a hack. We don't know yet and even if evidence is found the extent to which it is verifiable may be disputed.

More worrying is the fact that one link drops the whole chain for an extended period of time.

Indeed, which is why its a very bad thing that this firm (I too had never heard of 'Fastly') and Amazon (AWS) dominate the market like a monopoly, rather like Google does on many other things and the tech giants do on social media.

I thought that the whole point of the Internet was that it was designed to be decentralised with a significant amount of redundancy built-in to avoid this sort of thing.

That government websites are also caught up in this are equally worrying

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 16:26
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Bromptonaut

BBC are now reporting it as a user changing their settings revealing a software bug in a recent update:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57413224

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 16:47
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

One software bug bring nearly the entire system down. IMHO on a par with Microsoft for product integrity.

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 22:07
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - alan1302

One software bug bring nearly the entire system down. IMHO on a par with Microsoft for product integrity.

It caused issues for a few hours - and if Fastly closed down the web would still work - you just change where your device looks for the server - so not as big a thing as it seems to be.

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Thu 10 Jun 2021 09:12
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Bromptonaut

One software bug bring nearly the entire system down. IMHO on a par with Microsoft for product integrity.

It brought down, or at least slowed access to, a number of high profile websites. The cause was determined and service was restored pretty quickly. If the problem had been longer term than workarounds and re-routings would unjam things with a slightly longer delay.

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Thu 10 Jun 2021 14:46
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

One software bug bring nearly the entire system down. IMHO on a par with Microsoft for product integrity.

It brought down, or at least slowed access to, a number of high profile websites. The cause was determined and service was restored pretty quickly. If the problem had been longer term than workarounds and re-routings would unjam things with a slightly longer delay.

You would've thought for something that had that much of an effect, they'd thoroughly test it first. Rather like with cars, the public now appears to be unofficial beta testers, with software patches being released within days of new product releases.

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Wed 9 Jun 2021 22:10
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - alan1302

Indeed, which is why its a very bad thing that this firm (I too had never heard of 'Fastly') and Amazon (AWS) dominate the market like a monopoly, rather like Google does on many other things and the tech giants do on social media.

I thought that the whole point of the Internet was that it was designed to be decentralised with a significant amount of redundancy built-in to avoid this sort of thing.

That government websites are also caught up in this are equally worrying

How do you know Fastly have a monopoly when you've never heard of them?

The internet does still work like that - Fastly operates servers locally to people so that they can connect quicker - but they are not required for things to work. They just ensure that you can be connected to servers in the UK rather the US and the extra delay that causes.

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Thu 10 Jun 2021 14:48
Major international Internet Outage (08/06/21) - Engineer Andy

Indeed, which is why its a very bad thing that this firm (I too had never heard of 'Fastly') and Amazon (AWS) dominate the market like a monopoly, rather like Google does on many other things and the tech giants do on social media.

I thought that the whole point of the Internet was that it was designed to be decentralised with a significant amount of redundancy built-in to avoid this sort of thing.

That government websites are also caught up in this are equally worrying

How do you know Fastly have a monopoly when you've never heard of them?

I assumed that as their outage affected huge numbers of popular websites, including governmental ones, plus with AWS - which I DO know has a huge percentage of the web hostingmarket.

The internet does still work like that - Fastly operates servers locally to people so that they can connect quicker - but they are not required for things to work. They just ensure that you can be connected to servers in the UK rather the US and the extra delay that causes.

Maybe they should change their name to Slowly. :-)

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