Major Internet outage cripples two CONTINENTS

[Agent CSL]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html


Yesterday I really was asked how the internet could be suddenly "shut off." -- Is this proof enough for you? Let the conspiracy theories hit the fan! :D

[rodent]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html


Yesterday I really was asked how the internet could be suddenly "shut off." -- Is this proof enough for you? Let the conspiracy theories hit the fan! :D

I bet people went out into the parks, played, read books, and held hands. Kind of reminds me of that Simpson's episode when TV got boring because they got rid of the violence in cartoons like Itchy and Scratchy.

[LibertyOfOne]

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html


Yesterday I really was asked how the internet could be suddenly "shut off." -- Is this proof enough for you? Let the conspiracy theories hit the fan! :D

Yet no where is it mentioned that it was "switched off".

"One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.."

"An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to repair the fault."

Did you even bother to read the article? The above sounds more resonable. Where is your proof that it's one big conspiracy in order to get internet 2 though? Ah nothing. You are full of shit as usual. You can't just shut the internet off. The fact that you said that shows your ignorance on the topic. The internet is decentralized there is no main route any packet of information must travel. Like in the news article all the traffic was automatically routed over the other routes.

[nayjevin]

could it not be shut off via replicating virus?

[LibertyOfOne]

could it not be shut off via replicating virus?'

No

[joelfarm]

probably was done with transdermal thermal array gun.

[Mini-Me]

Yet no where is it mentioned that it was "switched off".

"One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.."

"An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to repair the fault."

Did you even bother to read the article? The above sounds more resonable. Where is your proof that it's one big conspiracy in order to get internet 2 though? Ah nothing. You are full of shit as usual. You can't just shut the internet off. The fact that you said that shows your ignorance on the topic. The internet is decentralized there is no main route any packet of information must travel. Like in the news article all the traffic was automatically routed over the other routes.

Although this is obviously not what happened, you are incorrect when you say that you can't just shut the Internet off...and besides, the original poster wasn't implying it was deliberate anyway - just that it's easy.
While the Internet is decentralized, the backbone routers and pipes are currently only owned and operated by a handful of large companies. If a fascist government ever really wanted to shut down the Internet, it could easily happen within a day, with or without actual destruction of property.

[EvilNight]

That wouldn't work, though. There are far too many redundant links, and routers are fiendish by design at finding every last possible one of them. Even if you kill every single major backbone data will still find its own way through the network.

Of course, killing the backbones reduces the available bandwidth to the point where the entire thing will jam up like a city that just lost every single highway. The economic consequences of that kind of slowdown would be severe.

As for the viruses, well, operating systems have reached a point these days where something like that is terribly difficult to achieve. Things just don't fail like they used to. Windows is still the most vulnerable.

I'd be more worried about lack of security at governmental facilities, where a clever hack could shut off a power grid, for example. It may be possible to set off cascade failures like what happened with the Northeastern Blackout a few years ago.

[nayjevin]

the backbone routers and pipes are currently only owned and operated by a handful of large companies.

that was my understanding, isn't sabatoge within that network possible? and aren't there commands like /shutdown on those machines? why can't replicating software cause a major outage?

[steph3n]

Actually the problem is that a major link went down, everyone switched to the backup link and it clogged badly. As well as during such times packets have to send multiple times to sed/rec the data due to error correction making a higher tcp overhead.

I have had some similar matters happen on a local SONET ring where a construction crew killed a fiber and when this happens the data is supossed to flow the other route, however it got highly congested due to a problem in the software of the switching and made for a long night of packetloss.

there are far less pacific routes than EU routes and if the EU routes have errors the pacific links get highly congested easily.

This also has taken down much of India and the outsourcing firms there.

[ItsTime]

the whole internet was shut down before and was only brought back up because the person attacking stopped.

[steph3n]

the whole internet was shut down before and was only brought back up because the person attacking stopped.

only in certain markets. I believe you may be speaking of some russians during the BlueSecurity fiasco? It was mostly a DNS outage of some root servers.

[Agent CSL]

Yet no where is it mentioned that it was "switched off".

"One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.."

"An official at Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that a boat's anchor may have caused the problems, although this was unconfirmed, AP reported. He added that it might take up to a week to repair the fault."

Did you even bother to read the article? The above sounds more resonable. Where is your proof that it's one big conspiracy in order to get internet 2 though? Ah nothing. You are full of shit as usual. You can't just shut the internet off. The fact that you said that shows your ignorance on the topic. The internet is decentralized there is no main route any packet of information must travel. Like in the news article all the traffic was automatically routed over the other routes.
Excuse me.

Ok, first of all, I did read the article and I knew it was a possible severed/disrupted undersea cable. When I was referring to "shut off" I was saying that the internet could be disrupted by any means. This is in response to people who tell me that they could make their own internet. It's possible you could make a network of connected computers locally but you need a satellite or cables to make one worldwide. If you don't have a means of connecting, you can't get on.

Maybe I am ignorant but that personal attack was uncalled for and hurtful.

[ignoranceisntbliss]

This is going to cause foreigners to demand their own control over their usage of the Net. CUrrently they go thru the US. I wonder what ever happened to China's & the EU's threats of starting their pwn internet versions?

[Goldwater Conservative]

Ted Stevens must have been dumping enormous amounts of material into his series of tubes. Enormous amounts of material. Anyone know if he was driving a big truck through the region?