Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It

davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning." Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.

Re:Redundancy and good planning.

[FauxPasIII]

These are two characteristics America is not known for.

That's because both redundancy and planning are properties of Communism. Please make a note of it.

It's not just the network architecture

[antifoidulus]

The network architecture isn't the only reason why we are still able to *mostly* communicate(I live about 60 km north of Tokyo, still no water though they haven't implemented the rolling blackouts....yet...), the advances in distributed systems also have made a huge impact. Simply put the amount of information to is essentially automatically mirrored(it's not really mirrored, but its easier to think of it like that) in Japan has really cut down on the amount of bandwidth necessary to communicate with the outside world.

I have noticed that for things that almost certainly aren't mirrored and require a direct connection to the US the bandwidth is probably 1/10 of what it usually is. While some of that may be due to increased traffic, I cannot help but think given the location of the quake that some of the cables between the US and Japan have been damaged. However services like Facebook and Google are as fast as they ever were. The reason for this is simple, both Google and Facebook have data centers in Japan that are designed to be eventually consistent. Instead of each individual request being routed to the states and back almost all the requests are routed to local data centers with only the updates coming from elsewhere being pushed through the cables. This obviously saves tons of bandwidth and allows for much better communication with the outside world. Now if you'll excuse me I gotta throw out most of my stuff and get the hell out of here. Tata!

Re:anthropomorphizing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a modification of a famous quote by John Gilmore [wikipedia.org]: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Know your Internet heroes. (Everybody recognizes that Zuckerberg twerp, but the net was fostered by people with beards!)

Re:It's not just the network architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

News reports say a couple of undersea cables between Japan and China are out, but nothing on the US side. Most of your international bandwidth problems are probably caused by the upsurge in people watching NHK online.

For all of the people who are wondering about this, I am here from the source...

I work for Global Crossing and we own the 20Gbps links that were damaged from the earthquakes and subsequent tsunami. We have ships going out today or tomorrow to lift the cables and repair them. Our reroutes are what are keeping the Internet going. For the companies reading this and who are constantly calling in, no, your connection is not worth more than human life. Reliance Globalcom, Comcast, Syfi...you are the heavy offenders. Please, it is being fixed soon as Japan allows transport in and out of the country. Please be patient and stop being brutish dicks on the phone.