What did you do in the evening (UK time) of 17th of February 2009? I remember there has been a day that week when my Internet worked very slowly. That probably was on 17th of February because on that day a little Internet pandemonium has happened.
As described in the article on Renesys Blog, a routing error of the local Czech Internet provider SuproNet has caused a chaos on the Internet forcing Internet routers that are old and less able to tolerate long autonomous system paths to shut down. As I understand, the wrong paths have been typed into the router and because the Internet is a world-wide system and SupoNet is a part of it, other routers began to use this wrong path thus dramatically increasing the routing traffic and crashing one after the other because they couldn’t cope with the surge of data. The global disruption of the Internet became obvious after 8 minutes it’s started and lasted for about an hour.
Below is the graph from Renesys Blog that shows how the router workload has increased around the world during the hour at which the error appeared on the router before it has been fixed.
That was ONE error by ONE Internet provider, so it should be obvious to everyone that it’s not so difficult to stop the world’s Internet traffic altogether. All what’s necessary are a couple of high-capacity routers, a couple of bribed system administrators and the coordinated action.
Some publications have said that what we’ve seen on 17th February is an Internet apocalypse. I wouldn’t call it like that. There has been a problem, an error, it has been rectified, everything’s ok now. There’s no guarantee it will not happen in the future - for example quite recently Gmail went down when Google data centres crashed and were offline for about 90 minutes.
As the Internet grows, the number of outages will probably grow too, so we just have to live with it for now just as we live with local home Internet providers that experience all types of problems all the time but in majority of cases promptly solve them.
March 3rd, 2009 - 1:07 am
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March 7th, 2009 - 6:35 pm
While its certainly true that it’s doable, it’s not particularly likely. Gmail going down really doesn’t have anything to do with the internet crashing.
March 9th, 2009 - 8:48 am
I also had the same problem. The problem was with my blog hosted 23 hops away from my country. The tech people of my hosting provider said they were helpless.
March 16th, 2009 - 6:10 pm
Thanks for his post! I had the same problem!