Is the Internet down?

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Marcelo Orlandi
Is the Internet down?

If you’re reading this, probably not this time, but in this post you will find out how easy and effective a simple mistake can take up to 15% of the internet down.

You may have heard or experienced problem last Monday 24/6 around 21.00hs Sydney time, when trying to access some pages or using services from Google, AWS and others. If you did have a problem, now you will know what happened.

Before going into technicalities, let me give an example which will explain what did happen and how it impacted the Internet traffic for around 2 hours.

Suppose that the street signs indicating which route or street you have to take are managed by different companies depending where you want to go to. However, the company advertising the route to Perth mistakenly advertised the route sign as “to Sydney” and therefore if you had planned to go to Sydney you find that you are actually travelling to Perth.

The bad part here is that you packed enough fuel to get to Sydney, not to Perth which is thousands of kilometres away. Suddenly you find yourself stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere without fuel.

Well, this is more-or-less what happened that night. Mistakenly, one provider advertised a route to their services/servers and suddenly they started receiving “cars going to Sydney through a Perth route” and going nowhere. If you were one of them, now you know why you did not get any response for the service, or the service performed very badly during that time.

Some of the services affected in Australia were the cryptocurrency exchanges CoinSpot and BTC Markets.

Some of the providers informed that they observed a loss, at the worst of the incident, of about 15 percent of their global traffic.

Just step back and think for a minute how easy and effective a silly mistake could, and did, bring part of the Internet down. The question is, how long do you think you can survive without the Internet? and your business?

1 week? 2 weeks? Think again. No email, this means not electronic invoice to and from providers, payslips, payroll, alerts, etc. Think again, 2 weeks? I do not think so….

Until next Malware Monday, be safe out there.