How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage 264
Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."
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How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage
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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
Huh (Score:5, Funny)
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The only strange thing is that if you look at the map, there's plenty of redundancy. All the affected countries had to do is route their traffic east rather than west and everything would have been fine (if, perhaps, a little slow). Why, then, was the failure so catastrophic?
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Something must have gotten in the way.
Re:Huh (Score:5, Interesting)
We have one line going from Brisbane to Hawaii and another from Sydney to New Zealand.
They are both part of the same network.
A few years back one of the cables got cut while the other was under maintenance.
All our internet was routed through the two western cables.
Do you realize how slow it was?
Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky.
Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.
Fast forward to today with high speed broadband and about 90 million people affected.
Yes data will be re-routed but it will probably be faster to snail mail Google asking for your search query.
Re:Huh (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you realize how slow it was? Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky. Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.
We've become so spoiled. Bandwidth has made us lazy. Why, 1 kbps is basically a 9600 bps modem. I used to do practical things on the Internet as those speeds. Just getting on your average web site these days would take too long for comfort. And what do we get in exchange? A lot of flashy graphics and advertisements.
Oh well.
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We used to get by using postal mail delivered by hand and taking weeks to get between countries. People got practical things done then. Of course now peoples systems and methodologies have adapted to the 'current' ways of working making it impractical to 'go back' for many.
Injustice (Score:5, Funny)
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Promises to be an interesting trip to the long green table [wikipedia.org], especially with the repair costs involved. Most stories I've heard of sailors and the LGT have a heavy Greek tragedy feel to them, even when the sailors are in the right.
They go over your bottom with a fine tooth comb and a magnet, and they Will Fin
What?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Bush? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) existing splices rerouted thru existing infrastructure
2) one of links fail
3) splices give up and sever connection as it cannot be reliably copied anymore...
Re:Injustice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Injustice (Score:5, Funny)
Some fisherman took "trolling the internet" a little too literally.
3rd cable cut (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3rd cable cut (Score:5, Informative)
The nation of Iran appears to be entirely disconnected from the Internet by these events: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm [internettr...report.com]
Re:3rd cable cut (Score:5, Insightful)
Colombia (Score:4, Informative)
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unknown-ff-ff-00-ff-ff-ff:~ floydman$ ping Colombia.com
PING colombia.com (199.125.90.76): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 199.125.90.76: icmp_seq=0 ttl=110 time=327.604 ms
64 bytes from 199.125.90.76: icmp_seq=1 ttl=110 time=333.573 ms
64 bytes from 199.125.90.76: icmp_seq=2 ttl=110 time=324.541 ms
64 bytes from 199.125.90.76: icmp_seq=3 ttl=110 time=324.487 ms
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Nobody was disconnected: besides the submarine cables, there are land cables and satellite connections, and the copper cables of old, which were used by telecoms.
Cable made out of Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Something tells me such a survey would not be very scientific.
Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
"To great applause from the audience of music managers, McGuinness insisted that disconnection enforcement would work."
How right he was!
Don't be silly! (Score:2)
Send Them a Bill (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Send Them a Bill (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, ships are governed by maritime law, which is designed to protect and encourage commerce; I'm not sure if they even would be responsible for damage from an anchor to a cable lying on the seafloor. From my limited recollection, vessel owners liability is generally the value of the vessel (not including the cargo).
Re:Send Them a Bill (Score:5, Informative)
Ships/captains plying international waters must have up-to-date info. If they damage a cable that is on the maps, they are responsible.
See the great WIRED article from Neal Stephanson on the laying of FLAG:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html [wired.com]
OK, it's an article from 1996, but it's one of the best WIRED articles (and looong) ever (back before they were owned by Conde Nast)
L. Scrub
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Some speculate based on weather in the area that they were just trying to stabilize themselves in a storm so that they didn't drift into solid structures. It may come down to bits versus human lives.
Re:Send Them a Bill (Score:4, Informative)
The fun part is the fact that when you touch the backbone cables suddenly the [direct] damages rises in a few orders of magnitude. And at that point it becomes more economically feasible for insurer to pull up any lawyer around than just to shrug it off.
Great Map! (Score:2)
... is due to change dramatically ... (Score:2)
Does anyone know what they mean by this?
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Not me. The whole stupid article was a whole stupid article. One ship hit all three cables? Which ship? TFA attests that a ship's anchor hit hit the cable(s). No affirmation. Nothing. No wonder we don't read the damn articles.
IIRC, the first two cables cut were 22 km apart. That's a pretty good anchor drag. Not saying it's impossible - it's a big, wide ocean with lots of aging freighters run by crews that likely had to be brought on ship via the crane.
I
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously as previous slashdot postings, one or two accidents may be a coincidence but three within a few weeks sounds more like a pattern.
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That's no physical location map. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's no physical location map. (Score:4, Informative)
Guess that's one way to avoid having your internet connection destroyed by an anchor...
Re:That's no physical location map. (Score:4, Funny)
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the AC
Now, I am not talking about nuclear attacks... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".
Re:Now, I am not talking about nuclear attacks... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. We're talking about (relatively) poor countries, so the budget for massively redundant infrastructure simply isn't there.
2. Cables across land are easy when the region you go through is politically stable. It's another matter when there's a war going on. For example, Egypt shares borders with Sudan, and a cable going West from Egypt would cross Algeria.
3. Cables across hundreds of km of undeveloped desert aren't cheap to install or maintain. It's much easier along existing infrastructure, but even then it's an expensive business.
4. Items 1 and 3 combined mean that you'll get a few high-capacity links instead of multiple smaller-capacity links.
5. The telecom tradition of 100% uptime is typical of first-world countries. In Africa, people tend to be more accepting of the occasional outage. See #1.
Also, how much redundancy is enough? Currently, Egypt has 3 major links (FLAG, SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4) to Europe, and 3 (the same cables) to Asia. They're all separated, so a single incident would take out (ballpark) 1/6 of their bandwidth. Severing 3 cables in one week falls under 'shit happens', IMO.
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Oh noes, teh pollutions. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh noes, teh pollutions. (Score:4, Funny)
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Good thing it wasn't token-ring. We'd never find the token underwater!
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Should be: How bad network design... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good news for US and European IT workers though: that buffoon who offshored your jobs has to explain why the IT department has been down for a few days. I guarantee the CEO/CFO is not amused that he can't get to SAP, or that the stores can't upload, or that whatever other mission critical system is off-line isn't working.
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7AM "Just kill the dissidents and get me my carpet!"
Rep: The King of Nepal has declared martial law and has cut off all communication, so I cannot check the status of that rug order...
http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/ [overheardintheoffice.com]
See it to believe it (Score:5, Informative)
Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?
Re:See it to believe it (Score:5, Informative)
There are no fibres running on the bottom of the Suez canal, all the fibres take an overland route. There are three major Egyptian landing areas in the Mediterranean, two west of Al Iskandariyah (Alexandria), and one to the east of Port Said, well away from the entry to the canal. The cable routes overland are now quite redundant, as cable cuts happen so often in Egypt every company now has at least two routes with circuit protection. On the Red Sea side, there are at least two landing points, at Abadiya and one across from there on the eastern side of the sea.
All the cable landing zones are quite well marked on shipping charts (my google skills have failed me, I can't find an online chart site for Egypt, similar to this one for the UK [kisca.org.uk]). Ships are not supposed to drop anchor in those zones, no fishing allowed, no recreational boating, etc. At least in Europe, boaters can get a pretty heavy fine for dropping anchor in a restricted area, big enough that any captain who values his vessel/career knows to stay out of the areas. I doubt Egypt has such draconian enforcement, but the charts are clearly marked.
For the two cuts off of Al Iskandariyah, there was a large storm in the eastern Med the day of the cuts, gale force 7 winds with large swells. So the local authority moved the anchorage area to west of Al Iskandariyah, and many ships ended up anchoring in the restricted zone, dragging their anchors as they were pulled along by the strong easterly winds.
Only one cable near Egypt was cut at first, the second major cut was near France, which took out FLAG. There was then a third cut in the Egypt area, of the same FLAG fibre, but by a different ship dragging anchor. So FLAG got hit double hard.
The most recent cut was somewhere down off of Dubai, which took out even more capacity. It's been an interesting week, as European banking traffic to the Emirates now has to flow all the way around the world the wrong way, and many of the intermediate carriers are choking on the traffic.
the AC
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Everything into NYC? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable [wikipedia.org]
There is also a natural shelf along most of the route.
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I believe the first undersea cable was New York to London.
The first Transatlantic cable was not NYC to London. Of course, rereading your post, I now see that you meant the London to Paris cable. The North American and European telegraph network were well along before someone came up with the funding for a Transatlantic cable.
Re:Everything into NYC? [Geography & Routing] (Score:3, Informative)
Two Reasons: Geography and Routing
1) Geography: First, the Guardian's map is a little oversimplified. Most of those cables come ashore in Eastern Long Island or along a relatively narrow stretch of New Jersey coastline, about 50 miles south of NYC proper. They're in those places because of submarine geography. The sea floor isn't flat- there are mountains and canyons, etc. Ever tried to run network cable through a crowded office? Pain in
coincidence or silver lining? (Score:3, Funny)
Priorities (Score:2, Funny)
Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. "People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do," said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.
And here's a big difference with the US. If the US were in the situation of limited bandwidth, we would all be encouraged to stop sending email to give priority to those shopping on iTunes.
So are we seeing... (Score:2)
This is just wrong! (Score:2)
Maybe there's some sailor/hacker out there called Ahab-Override who can save the day...
Cables not buried properly (Score:2)
A ha! (Score:2, Funny)
Misleading graphic alert (Score:4, Informative)
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
I call BS on 'one ship by accident' (Score:2)
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Last summer there was some underground work being done o
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Data centers were designed with FO carefully coming in rom different streets on different ends of the building, and there were carefully worded legal agreements which would prevent their upstream carriers from doing anything that would threaten the data center's redundanc
Distant Scandinavia (Score:2)
Ireland in Peril (Score:3, Interesting)
Or better yet, a cable to France, for not just geographical diversity but also geopolitical diversity. A cable to the Netherlands would give even better interconnectedness.
And of course it would be even better if that connection landed somewhere else than Dublin, so there's no failure bottleneck point.
Any extra cables would also increase Ireland's overall Internet bandwidth. As that country climbs out of the Industrial Age (and really the Farming Age), it'll need more than one cable. Especially if it doesn't want to get squeezed by some "bottleneck master".
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Greenland is next? (Score:2)
Are Sea Cables "Abandoned & Salvageable"? (Score:3, Interesting)
These cables DO contain valuable metals in them like copper, aluminum, and steel (probably stainless)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [wikipedia.org]
(I do realize that some of the recent cable cuts are not in international waters, but is still is an interesting query.)
I am not endorsing any harm of, nor the "salvaging" of any undersea cabling.
However, there are many, many others in the world who do not have the same sense of right and wrong (and virtually all of these examples are NOT in International Waters.)
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=wire+theft+copper+aluminum&btnG=Search [google.com]
Gas pipelines in Manhattan (Score:2)
designed to survive nuclear war (Score:3, Interesting)
All I can say (Score:3, Funny)
Whew! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So It Wasn't The Evil US's Fault??!! (Score:5, Funny)
Not all Slashdotters are *from* the US, you insensitive clod! I, for one, am posting from Teheran University and don't see why I should have to
*NO CARRIER*
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*NO CARRIER*
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Second, the U.S. has a bad track record when it comes to spying, so we don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
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Sometimes you just have to go with the odds.
"Tha facts have come out:" (Score:5, Interesting)
"According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday."
According to whose reports? Published where? What was the name of the ship? How was it discovered that it caused all the damage? Is the same ship also responsible for the third cable cut, which did not occur in the Mediterranean, and later than Wednesday?
This what you refer to as "facts". I sure hope you intended sarcasm.
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I didn't call him a name, I didn't say he was crazy - I suggested his actions were childish. They added nothing.
Neither do yours.
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What really gets me is why are people so ready to call someone else crazy and so ready to accept whatever they read from some corporate news source?
I don't expect anyone to take thing anything I said in my post (eg about HR1955 or S1959 or the articles with CIA sources regarding hackers shutting down power grids) as true on faith - if it catches your attention or you doubt it, then google the stuff and see for yourself...Your conclusions may
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- We all know who."
No country including Iran would use the internet for C4I, and BTW no credible invasion force could mass near Iran in secret.
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And just how many independent journalists would be able to report on a hypothetical invasion force or civilian casualties within Iran without the Internet?
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After seeing colleagues getting replaced by H1B's and outsourcing, I find myself hoping for the rest of the cables to be cut.