Live data from Hacker News

East Coast Internet Outage

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 265 posts

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these posts. They remind me that there are places in the world where technology is moving forward. Where we live in Tennessee I have to run 2 internet connections to be able to have a service when I need it. 3gb DSL and a 5gb satellite connection. The sat connection has the additional bonus of being capped at 150Gb per month. All these new streaming services may as well not even exist for those of us in rural…

When I bought a home, I limited my searches to ones that had symmetric fiber connections.

I bought a house 1+ year ago and had "good internet" connection on my must-haves. I remember visiting a house during the search and asking the listing agent about it. The guy was super candid, he basically told me no, there was no cable internet and that was the reason he knew it would be sitting on the market for a year at least.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#112
Completely unable to load anything today from 11:30sh to 12:30ish EST in Brooklyn, all seems to be smooth now. First ever issue with FiOS in two years, would still fully recommend them to anyone when comparing to most options, especially Comcast.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#113

>There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. A fiber cut auto heals automatically via bgp. Absolutely no truth in this claim from verizon. Meanwhile google, zoom, aws, and microsoft went down? There isn't any shared datacenters here. There's at least 3 distinct datacenters. So what's the truth? what actually went down?

Traffic is passing, although slowly.

I think this revealed that there is insufficient failover capacity.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#114

>There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. A fiber cut auto heals automatically via bgp. Absolutely no truth in this claim from verizon. Meanwhile google, zoom, aws, and microsoft went down? There isn't any shared datacenters here. There's at least 3 distinct datacenters. So what's the truth? what actually went down?

If 100 Gbps of capacity suddenly went away, then BGP attempted to route around it, and sent that traffic down 10 Gbps routers instead, which overloaded, or were not ready for the deluge of traffic, then those BGP routes could start flapping, at which point those routes would get pulled, forcing it onto yet other circuits, which may be 1 Gbps and that's how the outage continues to grow.

Too much capacity is centralized in certain providers, and if they go down there simply is no backup route that can handle the same traffic patterns.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#115
post #105

The FCC said that 3mbps upload speed is all internet users need. They might not be in tune with modern internet usage https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/21/22242635/fcc-ajit-pai-int...

To be fair, that was just Ajit Pai, who also thought net neutrality was not important. Now that he's gone, I hope he gets subjected to 3mbps upload speeds for the rest of his days.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I bought a home, I limited my searches to ones that had symmetric fiber connections.

Had to make this after seeing your post. https://i.imgflip.com/4vesal.jpg

Haha. I have a multi generational household. 4 adults, 2 children, and we're heavy Facetime/Apple TV users. 4 to 8 HD simultaneous video streams is normal, plus the security cameras. I also wanted to be able to stream from my server at home anywhere I am. And with 2 people working from home, it was an amazing decision.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#117
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't doubt it. Single misconfigured routers have caused issues of similar scale.

I believe the internet is designed to handle broken links, but is not very robust against misconfigured (or malicious) routers.

If a 100 Gbps link goes down, and all the other links that could carry that route are only 10 Gbps... it goes downhill quickly.

Too much traffic is concentrated at the major carriers which carry a large amount of traffic over relatively little fiber (cause its cheaper) and when that fiber disappears we lose a massive amount of capacity...

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#118

>There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. A fiber cut auto heals automatically via bgp. Absolutely no truth in this claim from verizon. Meanwhile google, zoom, aws, and microsoft went down? There isn't any shared datacenters here. There's at least 3 distinct datacenters. So what's the truth? what actually went down?

Uh presuming that the connection is multihomed which is not the case for residential connections in NY.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#119

>There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. A fiber cut auto heals automatically via bgp. Absolutely no truth in this claim from verizon. Meanwhile google, zoom, aws, and microsoft went down? There isn't any shared datacenters here. There's at least 3 distinct datacenters. So what's the truth? what actually went down?

It might sound conspiratorial, but when the WTC was attacked in 2001, the Internet slowed down a few days after. We'll probably never know, but I assumed it was deeper surveillance being implemented.

Every time an outage like this happens without a following postmortem, I wonder if it was a surveillance oopsie.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I bought a home, I limited my searches to ones that had symmetric fiber connections.

I priced having a 10m fiber connection brought out here. I was quoted just over $5k/month with a minimum 3 year contract. I assume they were expecting me to just pay for the new service to the entire area for them to resell. Wife wanted to live out here. So we traded my being able to work easily for amazing views and lots of land. Not entirely unhappy with the trade, but there are days when I think about just renting…

If you search HN you will find that negotiating plays a big role in the cost of leased line access. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3892854
Post reply on HN