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The Internet

Major Internet Outage: Dozens of Sites are Down (cnn.com) 57

"Cloudflare, an internet service that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself Sunday, taking dozens of websites and online services along with it," reports CNN: Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems Sunday morning. Cloudflare said the problem was with a third-party "transit provider," and its service was becoming increasingly stable over the course of the day... CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:15 AM ET... DownDetector, which displays reports of internet and service outages, showed that reports of internet connectivity came in across the United States and Europe Sunday morning.
Anyone experiencing any connectivity issues this morning?
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Major Internet Outage: Dozens of Sites are Down

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  • Many sites are down or super slow or malfunctioning, local and international sites. Right now it's 19:42, it's been going on since morning.
  • by dwillden ( 521345 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @11:44AM (#60455512) Homepage
    It appears that L3 broke IPV4 routing for much of the world as well.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/ijb8tn/global_as3356_level3_outages/
  • In networking, you are only as strong as the weakest link, so what exactly does a "problem with a transit provider" mean, and why would Cloudflare be dependent on such a transit provider?
    • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @11:56AM (#60455566) Homepage
      For a company that claims to be so important to the internet, there appears to be a lack of redundancy.

      But I guess if someone screws up the routing bad enough then redundancy won't help too much. Hi level3.
    • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @11:58AM (#60455574) Homepage

      BGP is the real weakest link. The idea that the Internet routes around damage only works if you stop trusting when systems lie to you about what those routes are.

      • What does it take to fix BGP? Is there anything in development? It does seem to be a mess, especially with bad actors.

        • by wimg ( 300673 )
          The fix is Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), but so far only a few big networks have deployed it. However it's unlikely to be purely a BGP issue here.
          • by Anonymous Coward
            RPKI would not have prevented this outage. CenturyLink was authorized to publish those routes. It just failed to deliver the traffic.
            • Did Level 3 publish the routes in error though? That is the type of failure I was hoping there is a solution on the table to prevent, in order to maintain the whole “route around a problem.”

        • by Anonymous Coward

          What does it take to fix BGP? Is there anything in development? It does seem to be a mess, especially with bad actors.

          It takes you defining "fix" and "broken"

          Here it did exactly what it is supposed to. It is how the backbones update and share routing information such as how and where to reach a network.

          Level3 told their routers to tell the Internet everything was reachable through Level3.
          BGP did exactly what it was told to do.

        • by Monoman ( 8745 )

          Probably a trust and vote mechanism that lets the other carrier / peers weigh in on routes, changes, etc.

      • I wouldn't blame the protocol if peers are lying. It's not hard to successfully implement BGP and redistribution of interior routes. And ISPs have gotten pretty good about not leaking broken or bogus routes.
  • by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @11:50AM (#60455546) Homepage Journal

    Anyone experiencing any connectivity issues this morning?

    Well, since you asked, yes, actually, I did experience some connectivity issues. There was this tech website I read sometimes, Slashdot.org, that wasn't working for most of the morning.

    I think it's back up now, I'm not sure.

    • Thank god. Unable to start a pointless argument on the internet this morning I ended up arguing with the wife about who's turn it is to cook dinner. Glad we're back to normal.

      Now argument ... Ooh I know one: You're wrong, Slashdot isn't a tech website. It's news for nerds.... mostly political nerds it seems.

    • by wap911 ( 637820 )
      6:07 CST
      Slashdot is still taking about 15 seconds to load any page.
      located in zip code 78380 and using PIA [private internet access] but still bad with normal ISP connection from Sputum [sorry, spectrum]
  • This morning I was not able to connect to this very site on several attempts. This would have been around 6 AM to roughly 7 AM ET.

    Other than that, no issues anywhere.

  • Level3's fault (Score:5, Informative)

    by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @11:51AM (#60455552) Journal

    I received this alert from our hosting provider (followed by 100s of customer emails who apparently didn't get the memo):

    Level3, one of our network providers, has been having a major
          intermittent outage affecting at least the East Coast of the
          United States since approximately 6:00 AM this morning. They
          are accepting traffic for our network and dropping 50% or more
          of it. Even when we shut down the line, they continue to
          announce and drop traffic (a situation reported by other
          network operators in a variety of locations as well). Until
          they correct their configuration issue and honor our requests
          to stop announcing our traffic, this problem will persist. We
          are keeping as much pressure on them as we can to resolve the
          issue. Anyone who reaches our network via any of our other
          network providers -- Telia, GTT, or Cogent -- will be
          unaffected.

  • It's a pleasant sunny day where I am. Maybe I'll go out to the park and quack back at the ducks.
  • by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Sunday August 30, 2020 @12:00PM (#60455582) Homepage
    CenturyLink is not a renamed Level 3. Rather, CenturyLink acquired Level 3 in 2016. CenturyLink got its start in 2008.
  • Aren't those the people that offer that fancy schmancy "secure" DNS thingy?

    • Cloudflare is something I grudgingly allow Noscript to temporarily allow when a page I really want to see is blocked. It's just a nasty speedbump.

  • I hope that explains my issue, been doing a lot of network testing and been seeing lots of issues. Been trying to figure why.
    • No internet via my Pihole today - solved thanks to a poster on Reddit who mentioned this was going on.

      Swapping upstream DNS server to Google sorted it for now, I think it was Quad9 I was using before (forgotten already)...

  • I was awoken more than once last night by system alerts followed by reports from my colocation provider that they were disconnecting traffic from CenturyLink but that CenturyLink was still advertising routes. Some traffic to vendors/clients got through and other didn't. Major screwup by CenturyLink.

    • We had the same issue, disconnected it connection from CenturyLink but they continued to advertise our routes, my traffic was reaching remote locations but the return traffic was just disappearing.

  • Over the last week, I've been getting scam calls on my home phone allegedly from CenturyLink wanting me to let them in through Teamviewer or through a tinyurl so they could "update the firmware" on my modem, Well, they're not my ISP....So maybe someone found a way into their root system? I'm in Northern Nevada and CenturyLink only has a small footprint in the Vegas area

  • So at work when the boss asks "why did this happen?" I will blame my ISP, and my ISP will blame Cloudflare, and Cloudflare will blame CenturyLink. How does one company have the ability to take down a significant portion of the Internet (and my VOIP, and other all of my other servers - even our backup ISP was affected) Those who are in charge of the Internet and are much smarter than me need to figure out what needs to change to make sure this cannot happen again. Please! And thank you!
    • It can't be prevented from happening again. The internet is a composite entity, not a corporate one. A device doesn't just connect to it - it becomes part of it (and potentially traffic can be routed through it). Some of the devices are connected by fibre-optic trunk cables - some are held together with the network equivalent of Scotch tape and string. Because of the interdependency and interconnectedness, a misconfiguration can quickly propagate and cause massive problems. And no one entity owns or is resp
  • They seem to be vying for the king of unexpected outages title...certainly back when we were using them.
  • I've have CenturyLink DSL and on the most part have been happy with it as it is reliable and inexpensive compared to cable and I can get static IPs which cable require you to spend more and have a business account. This past week has been nothing but issues. Disconnects every 40 minutes or so or very slow speed. Had CenturyLink check my line and twice they said they will send someone out. They claim they did on at least one occasion but could not prove it by me. Now I am hearing it may have all been due to

  • The young and beautiful girl looks for the () good man! Follow the link my contacts ==>> is.gd/profile6438
  • CL is the sole provider of DSL for city and rural locations in my area and my clients have non-stop trouble with them. Constant outages, speeds often 1/20th of what their told they are getting, terrible technical support, continued price increases for services. They've been promising that they will upgrade their local phone and internet systems to people for over 2 years now without a single improvement in speed or reliability. They are an absolute joke of a company.

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