Fire Takes Azerbaijan Offline (datacenterdynamics.com) 57
judgecorp writes: On Monday, 90 percent of Azerbaijan lost Internet access, due to a fire at one data center in Baku, the capital of the former Soviet Republic. Cables caught fire at the Delta Telecom facility, and international providers including NTT and Telecom Italia all lost service for nearly eight hours. Some interesting snippets: Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic that has seen rapid development thanks to its rich oil and gas reserves. The country has been running several projects aimed at modernizing its communications infrastructure, including participation in Trans-Eurasian Information Highway (TASIM). ... At about 16:10 on Monday, consumers, businesses and government agencies across Azerbaijan suddenly lost their connections to the Internet. Banks couldn’t make domestic money transfers, and even Point-of-Sale terminals were not working. ...
Interestingly, no international traffic flowing though Azerbaijan was affected by the outage. “Transmission channels to Georgia, Iran, and the Middle East were working at full capacity,” Iltimas Mammadov, the minister of communications, told AzerNews.
Shaming a country (Score:2)
Might as well just say pwned by Lenin
Goes through one spot for a reason (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire countries internet goes through a single building for a reason and it's not cost. They've not forgot their KGB roots.
Re:Goes through one spot for a reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Single point to take the entire country offline?
CLOSED: Works as designed.
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I though the internet was supposed to route around damage. Something is too centralized.
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I though the internet was supposed to route around damage. Something is too centralized.
At an IP routing level, sure. But that doesn't do any good if there's only one physical cable or set of cables linking you to the rest of the world.
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The Internet routes around the damage. Nobody outside Azerbaijan noticed the outage.
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It is because of cost. The US has more sites and the monitoring works just fine. China is probably the same.
Not that there's anything wrong with keeping costs down. I don't know Azerbaijan, but maybe 99,9999% uptime is not their top priority.
Re:Goes through one spot for a reason (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's most likely because they didn't think of physical location redundancy... I've seen "redundant" set ups which where strictly maintained within a building get totally undone the second the fiber runs get mounted on the same poles to cross the street before they split and when their separate ways. Nobody was paying attention until a dump truck accidentally snagged both fiber runs and yanked them down the street, disconnecting both redundant fibers in one accident.
So, where it may have started as a KGB thing, nobody really thought though how their redundant design on paper, fell to a single physical event because they didn't maintain enough separation. Or, maybe it just was the NSA, providing low cost engineering services to keep them under their thumb?
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That and I've seen great cost for redundancy for redundancy's sake where the complexity added to get redundancy made the whole network less stable. 1 box with a MTBF of 10,000 hours means one outage every year. 4 boxes with the sam
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Yep, that reminds me of a "redundant" system we purchased once. It had two processors that ran in locked step so you could fail over seamlessly from the primary to the secondary at the slightest indication of a fault (say an ECC error, or some noise on some address line). Sounds great on paper... Problem was, when this happened, you where no longer redundant until you could reboot the system which took something like 20 min to cleanly shut down, reset the redundancy and restart everything. Starting the sys
Re: They should have used APPS! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, why use these data centers when you can just put your data in the cloud?
And the whole country says.. (Score:2)
Network's down... bagel run!
And this friends, is a real problem (Score:1)
If terrorists were halfway competent, this is the kind of thing they'd do rather than trying to frighten the population with useless displays of violence.
And it can happen by accident.
Or was it?
Re:95% muslim country can't keep basic infrastruct (Score:5, Interesting)
I am the first person to criticize Muslims, but people of the ex Soviet Republics are just nominal Muslims - nothing like the Quran thumpers that you'll find in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or Iran. In fact, most of them also recognize Israel and have full diplomatic relations w/ Israel - something that's unthinkable for most Muslim countries.
Also, while I'm no fan of Communism either, that's the one thing that has kept the stans - particularly Uzbekistan - from becoming an Islamic regime like Afghanistan.
Re: (Score:2)
The Syrian regime is 'secular' and socialist. The Syrian people - the vast majority of them are Sunni fanatics, indistinguishable from their comrades in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The reason ISIS has the support it has is that an overwhelming majority of Syrian Sunnis support it. They are 80% of the Syrian population
As for the Baath regimes in both Syria and Iraq, they are/were 'secular' in the following aspect. Whenever a country is under pressure to be declared 'Islamic', what that means is that the
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Can't route around a horrible network design. 90% of the country's network was all routed to a single building with evidently no redundant links.
The Internet routed around Baku without issue. And there were redundant links. They just all went into the same building.
In soviet russia we fire you! (Score:1)
In soviet russia we fire you!
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For Context (Score:3)
Pennsylvania:
46,055 sq mi
12,787,209 population
Azerbaijan:
33,436 sq mi
9,624,900 population
Re: (Score:2)
Pennsylvania:
12 letters
Starts with a P
Azerbaijan:
10 letters
Starts with an A
Cold War much? (Score:2)
Part of WHERE? (Score:2)
Azerbaijan
Ukraine
Belarus
Estonia.
One of those is not like the others.
(Hint: it borders Iran).
Re: (Score:3)
The thing about Azerbaijan, Turkey and the stans is that the secular elements of those countries see themselves as a part of Europe, while the Islamic elements see them as a part of the medieval Timuride, Seljuk or Ottoman empires. (I'm not including Tajikistan in this analysis, since that country, despite being Sunni, is culturally more allied to Iran).
Azerbaijan is Shi'ite like Iran, but Turkic, like 4 of the stans and Turkey. Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Uzbek are all Sunnite and Turkic. Turkey was a
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Part of the issue with the former soviet republics is that Russia shuffled the locals around. Russia liked the idea of a winter retreat Crimea, so they shipped in Russians, and move the others out.
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But that's been a process that's been undone since the Cold War. Like Kazakhstan was 50% Kazakh and 45% Russian in 1991, when the Soviet Union came apart. Today, it's 63% Kazakh, and 23% Russian: since that time, most Soviet people have returned to their native lands - like Russians returning to Russia, Ukrainians returning to Ukraine, Uzbeks returning to Uzbekistan and so on. As for Crimea, Stalin saw Crimean Tatars as a potential threat, and shipped them out to Central Asia. Culturally, the Crimean Ta
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So what you're saying, is that Azerbaijan was a former soviet republic; seriously? Let's move on from the cold war and call it what it is: part of Europe.
Part of Europe? Oh, yeah -- the part of Europe that is called the Russia and Caucasus region of Asia, though some might consider it part of the Middle East region of Asia.
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At this rate it will only be a matter of years before Australia is considered part of Europe too.
Bummer (Score:3)
Seems like their data center didn't have a firewall.
Someone took this article too seriously (Score:2)
http://gizmodo.com/5833267/why-the-internet-should-die-in-a-fire
90%? (Score:1)
That means they have more than 10 users?
Azerbaijan - Land of Fire (Score:2)
If you think I'm kidding, click here. [marca.com]