Welcome!

By registering with us, you'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

SignUp Now!

Yes, the internet is a little broken right now!

root

Active Coder
Yes, the internet is broken at the moment for a lot of people.

The largest one impacted at the moment is CloudFlare: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

However, this is impacting a lot of providers and routing all over the internet is wack at the moment, so everyone take a deep breath, and enjoy the outside world for a bit while the mice get the cheese to the right place.

Update: As of this posting CloudFlare states the network responsible for the route leak has patched the boat and we aren't sinking as fast now. Things should start returning to normal.

 
Last edited:
Interesting... I was wondering why I was experiencing so many issues this morning. I assumed it was because the wireless card on this old laptop isn't as good or it was an issue with my Linux MInt installation because I did some tweaking. However, things have been better for the last 20 minutes so maybe it wasn't my fault after all :)
 
I often wonder what would happen if the internet broke for months without warning.
And then I realize I would be out of a job, unable to contact a lot of friends and family, the economy would crash, there would be widespread rioting, and the world as we know it would collapse with a long recovery that could take years. :( scary stuff!
 
This is why we need radical decentralization.
It's ridiculous that an outage in America prevents me from chatting with other people in Germany.
 
Few years ago, there was a myth of 7 secret keys which can reset the whole internet and I was in a same shoe as you are right now.

Juicy readings:
 
Apparently the culprit was that "Allegheny Technologies Incorporated" announced a better-reachable route for Cloudflare through Verizon. (links to AS)

Source:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
This is why we need radical decentralization.
It's ridiculous that an outage in America prevents me from chatting with other people in Germany.
I agree, there should be servers spread across the world to prevent one country or power grid from affecting everyone else. However, certain companies cannot afford to do that, so it's always going to be a potential risk. One of the major problems with CloudFlare is that you actually set your nameservers to point at them, so if they go down the only real option you have is to change the nameservers on the domain, but it can take 24-48 hours for caches to refresh for everyone (to know which server the domain is hosted on), and usually CF is back up and running by then, so it's hardly worth the trouble.... but you just sit there waiting on CloudFlare to fix itself. It's annoying.
 
certain companies cannot afford to do that, so it's always going to be a potential risk

That's why I like decentral interconnected protocols like XMPP or ActivityPub.
A company doesn't need to be able to buy thousands of servers, if we aren't relying on one big company in the first place.
 
This is incredibly interesting to me.
I have been aware of the implications of DNS providers and routing for a while, but I never knew about there being 7 or 14 actual people responsible. If anything these articles make me a bit happier because it's far more secure than I had originally thought.

One side story about DNS and the power that domain providers and hosts have... This isn't specifically about ICANN, but it definitely relates!

I came across a cryptocurrency called PlexCoin that promised extremely high returns. It didn't seem realistic, even with crypto trends going up and down. They were guaranteeing certain returns, advertising Visa cards for their coin, and a lot more. I did a bunch of research and found out that Visa had no clue who they were / they weren't a registered bank so they couldn't offer legitimate Visa cards online like they were pretending to do. I also discovered their white papers were nowhere to be found and even when they were finally released, they did little to calm my suspicions. Long story short, after a day or two of research I decided to take action.
I was able to talk to their registrar, NameCheap, and provide them all of the information I had. I basically said "this site is a scam, here's the proof - you should take down their website to save hundreds of thousands of potential victims from this." They did in fact revoke the domain name and pointed it at their suspended page. Of course a cache was in place, so some people were still redirected to the actual website. So, I contacted their hosting provider with the same proof and had their hosting suspended.

About a week later the SEC launched an investigation and a lot of the reasons for their interest in PlexCoin lined up to the proof I had sent them the same night I spoke with NameCheap. So, I believe I did help get Plex shut down. The point is this though - even though the SEC took a week to launch an official investigation, and even though it was months before Plex had their assets frozen, it was the domain registrar and host that effectively shut them down. The people who control the nameservers and domains are in power. They can make any website address go anywhere they want, and they can use that for malicious purposes. In my case, they used that power to shut down a scam cryptocurrency, but any unchecked power should be questioned. For that reason, I am in support of the 7 keys - because could you imagine if there was 1 key holder? Or no security protocol?

As you can see here, the SEC investigation was a success, although they did manage to get away with millions of dollars in the short time they were launching.

Most markets do not support PlexCoin (PLX), but unfortunately there was a lot of ongoing support for the coin even with the investgations - Or maybe that's good, so that scammed investors had an option to get out of PLX by trading it on certain marketplaces. I may be wrong, but I think it's completely gone now - can't be traded or mined. So yeah, that my friends is how I shut down a $10 million-ish scam cryptocurrency from my home computer
 
Last edited:
This shows only too well how dependent the Internet is on large companies.
No matter if CloudFlare or Google if one of these two companies wants to exert pressure it has billions of intellectuals with one click.
 
I've only recently changed over to CloudFlare, but I'm already thinking of reverting the change..

About half of my bookmarked sites were offline due to the outage.
 
I've only recently changed over to CloudFlare, but I'm already thinking of reverting the change..
About half of my bookmarked sites were offline due to the outage.

This shows only too well how dependent the Internet is on large companies.
No matter if CloudFlare or Google if one of these two companies wants to exert pressure it has billions of intellectuals with one click.

There have been some theories online that a major 0day exploit was discovered, a hardware concern was discovered, or a major hack took place. Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp all had outages with their image servers... CloudFlare was down... A couple major news sites were down... I can't even list them all before I have my morning coffee, but there have been around 8+ major outages in the last month.

Here's a very interesting article suggesting it's a BGP issue (Border Gateway Protocol).
BGP issues are seen in @sn0w 's post & image above too...

Here's a group of somewhat ethical hackers in 1998 testifying to Congress about how easy it would be to take down the entire internet by attacking BGP.
Congress moved on without many changes, and many people stated that 10+ years later BGP was still vulnerable.
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
Reason enough not to centralize the whole Internet...
Codeforum was also not online because it uses cloudflare.

Here's a group of somewhat ethical hackers in 1998 testifying to Congress about how easy it would be to take down the entire internet by attacking BGP.
Congress moved on without many changes, and many people stated that 10+ years later BGP was still vulnerable.
Very depressing
 
Not sure if it's related, but Optimum has been having major service interruptions. On Demand is completely frozen on my home TVs, and when we were at my girlfriend's family's home for 4th of July we noticed that they were having the same exact issue.. .we thought it was a problem with the remotes, but nope - Definitely a more widespread issue with Optimum tv. Might be related, might not!
 
There you can see how far-reaching the consequences are for monopolized services.
Decentralized is the only logical solution.
 

New Threads

Latest posts

Buy us a coffee!

Back
Top Bottom