Did the internet just cut out for half of the world?

195  2014-01-13 by [deleted]

The live feed on twitter suggests that people with AT&T, Mediacom, Cox, Time Warner, and many others experiences an outage in internet connectivity from approximately 2:00-2:30AM. Servers for EA games, Riot, Blizzard, and Rockstar we're all confirmed to be dropped for many people.

This website: http://public-root.com/root-server-check/

Showed this response: http://imgur.com/gHBJ7ZH at 3:00am(30 minutes after the outage)

Responses to the drop: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1v3gio/anyone_else_having_trouble_playing_anything/

People from the west to the east coast experienced this outage. http://imgur.com/pZNTF3y

Take this for whatever it's worth, but I find this to be a very odd situation. I'd love to hear if you guys have any take on this.

EDIT: This better be on the news tomorrow.

90 comments

40  vqhm 2014-01-13

Yes, they just updated PRISM in the US, next Europe, then Asia /pure conjecture/

here's the thread in technology http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1v3fb2/internets_going_down_abandon_ship/

screen grab from: http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html http://i.imgur.com/QjczB7l.png

You can see a few big spikes on all major websites here: http://downdetector.com/

quite a few north american routers are showing 100% packet loss http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

25  [deleted] 2014-01-13

People are acutally suggesting this was to install/remove something from the NSA and getting upvotes. Makes me happy.

I think they're seeing how fishy it is for all of that stuff to go down at once. From what I've seen no one has given an actualy possible reason.

22  Ferrofluid 2014-01-13

more likely new W3C IP6 packet tracing software, their goal is unique IP/id number attached to every packet that travels the internet, so everything is traceable back to the originator and also to the recipient.

the NSA's wet dream

9  [deleted] 2014-01-13

It just makes me happy that some people are watching. Actually I'll go check if slashdot has a post on this. They tend to be pretty accurate (and cynical) when it comes to this stuff.

1  OakTable 2014-01-13

Source/link?

13  Up_Late 2014-01-13

The r/technology thread has been deleted :(

17  midtable_obscurity 2014-01-13

It's still up, but it got removed from the front page.

8  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

6  gfycat-bot 2014-01-13

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0  Alienm00se 2014-01-13

Oh Cornel West, will you ever stop being amazing?

5  vqhm 2014-01-13

http://public-root.com/root-server-check/

1  TheKolbrin 2014-01-13

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

That internet traffic report site shows last update now as being 12/26/20012- on the graphs and site index.

-1  Co0ki3Munsta 2014-01-13

look to the south pole

3  Ambiguously_Ironic 2014-01-13

Can you elaborate?

-4  Co0ki3Munsta 2014-01-13

i guess you can look right here aw well -->

3  Ambiguously_Ironic 2014-01-13

...thanks for the meaningless reply, man.

33  [deleted] 2014-01-13

The thread has been removed from /r/technology. And no media mention so far...

31  AssuredlyAThrowAway 2014-01-13

God damn it why must Reddit mods try to manipulate the organic curation of content.

19  Zebraton 2014-01-13

$$$

13  AssuredlyAThrowAway 2014-01-13

Yep. And I have an idea who might be behind it.

I want to set up this call with [Alexis'] associate Erik from Antique Jetpack.

6  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

This should be reposted. A lot.

10  OakTable 2014-01-13

I messaged the /r/technology mods. They said, "It's an editorialized title. See out sidebar."

Anyone want to resubmit with a better title, and maybe put a link to the other thread/an explanation of what's been going on in the comments?

1  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

1  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

-5  moparornocar 2014-01-13

Honestly I kind of have to agree with it being removed due to that rule.

However, I do not agree with the rule itself, and its shitty they can "censor" something based off that shitty rule.

The title is kind of played up past what is really happening.

3  arynx 2014-01-13

Exactly. It's like a rule of "No sensational titles." Then any questionable or conflict of interest can be deemed "sensational," thus removed.

1  moparornocar 2014-01-13

Exactly, which is why I disagree with it. At the same time the OP can not exaggerate in the title, and be clear and it won't violate the rules.

1  OakTable 2014-01-13

I asked the iana about it and posted what they said in that thread.

tl;dr: One of the guys who operates one of the root servers said that they didn't go down.

21  Kaladin3104 2014-01-13

They took it down just as in was garnering a huge following, basically from all of Reddit. This is blatant censorship. Jesus Christ, when will people realize this kind of stuff is happening more and more often here on Reddit. I wonder what the Admins BS reason was this time?

8  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

In light of what this outage means, devolving into a circlejerk about reddit censorship (and the subsequent ineffectual witch hunt) would be a welcome diversion for those who are hoping we ignore whatever just happened.

Stay on target.

2  Kaladin3104 2014-01-13

I did not mean to divert attention from the real issues. However, I find it disgraceful that articles continue to disappear for reasons that most of us would find trivial. However, it is really odd that is disappeared right as people were starting to say it was probably the NSA who played a part in it. Once comments like that gained traction, boom, it was gone.

1  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

Really.

You find that really odd. Considering what we all know, what is in the public sector regarding that organization. You think it's odd.

2  Kaladin3104 2014-01-13

No, I guess not. But we need to put some focus on the censorship going on. Why is it you pick apart everything I say?

16  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

16  Ferrofluid 2014-01-13

Google search returns no relevant links regarding the recent outage. Not one.

the ever helpful google, except when its not in their or their paying clients interests.

Google = MoI

always puzzled me why Google got so upset over people posting Jane Standley videos to Youtube, they kept removing them during that week. it was some boring news footage from a non US news company from overseas.

yet Google/Youtube were manically obsessive in their removal of them.

'by their actions ye shall know them'

2  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

Just in case you're lazy reader, Jane Standley is the BBC reporter that reported on the WTC 7 collapse 23 minutes before it actually collapsed.

12  sloblow 2014-01-13

So, the internet CAN be shutdown. Nice. Kill-switch employed.

5  demalo 2014-01-13

Did you try turning it off and on?

Yes?

OK.

3  Scoled321 2014-01-13

or being installed and tested.

8  OakTable 2014-01-13

Oh, it wasn't just my connection that was crapping out, then?

Um, when you give a time you need to specify a timezone, though. Was it Central Standard time? Because 2-2:30 AM here is what time it cut out for me.

2  Scolez 2014-01-13

Cut out about midnight PST for me

2  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

My connection dropped at the appropriate time as well. I took it as a sign to GO TO BED.

Didn't know it was everyone.

8  0x2620 2014-01-13

The original post in /r/technology has been hidden, slid, or something.

This morning it was on the front page of reddit, now it isn't even displaying in /r/technology. ~1500 upvotes, WTH?

6  ugdr6424 2014-01-13

"Global DNS servers go down all the time...."

8  readyready 2014-01-13

Could this have something to do with pending changes to the NSA ala President Obama's annoucenment scheduled for 1/17? Cannot tell if this is good or bad.

2  Doc---Hopper 2014-01-13

It's bad.

2  Ambiguously_Ironic 2014-01-13

Given those two options, my guess would be "bad".

3  readyready 2014-01-13

I don't know why I would think it's good, if it's been done in the dead of night, but I thought maybe he was going to back off something that hasn't come out yet? What the hell, I can dream.

2  Ambiguously_Ironic 2014-01-13

Would be nice and I'm definitely hopeful that that's the case. Knowing what we all know, though... I'd say it's doubtful at best.

1  readyready 2014-01-13

I agree. Someone must have slipped me some lithium when I wasn't looking.

1  ronintetsuro 2014-01-13

Procedurally speaking, the government frequently rolls out infrastructure changes before they announce them publicly.

1  readyready 2014-01-13

Seems legit.

7  I_am_a_Painkiller 2014-01-13

The internet shuts off in half of the U.S and the title of the post is "Internet shits off for half the world".

People need to get some perspective.

7  grammar_is_optional 2014-01-13

Yeah, could someone actually explain what happened and give actual locations? Because if the time in the OP is USA eastern or central, I was awake for that and using the goddamn internet without any trouble, I'm at work and no-one has mentioned having any trouble... So yeah, the thread here and on /r/technology is just people saying "panic!" without giving any details.

2  maelu 2014-01-13

Did you only read the title?

1  I_am_a_Painkiller 2014-01-13

No I read the whole thing. It must of only effected the Northern half of the world. Because here in the southern half of the planet, the internet is just fine.

We should probably check in with Europe. See if they are A-ok.

5  EmpressSharyl 2014-01-13

Nothing worked for me, here on the west coast. Kept timing out.

5  Dazedddd 2014-01-13

I just worked an overnight at a hotel and around this time a guest called and asked if we usually have signal issues with AT&T because his Internet wasn't working.

5  AZSnakePit 2014-01-13

Looks to be an outage of AT&T systems that was responsible. Note: even if you don't use AT&T directly, this would still have an effect for you, if your ISP routes traffic through their network [this is how the Internet works - "Internet" is short for "interconnected networks"].

This may be malfeasance, but I've been in IT long enough to know incompetence is much more likely.

3  WootenWorship 2014-01-13

Yeah, as much as I love a good conspiracy, the "NSA changing software" stuff just doesn't make the least bit of sense. Any kind of software update would be gradually distributed through the high level routing devices so as not to impact traffic flow (and by extension not draw any attention to it).

Nobody in their right mind would "reboot everything at once". That would just be going full retard.

So, yeah, incompetence likely. If it's malicious, maybe some kind of test run of a cyberattack.

4  alllie 2014-01-13

Maybe they are practicing how to shut down things.

3  doughwu 2014-01-13

piratebay kept timing out for me. I had to use TOR to access the site.

0  Meister_Vargr 2014-01-13

Then the internet wasn't down.

3  OakTable 2014-01-13

There's a thread about it in /r/sysadmin: att outage?

I don't know how good of a site News Reporter is, but at least some news site seems to have mentioned it: Internet Outage: Half of Worlds Internet is down possibly due to attack

Edit to add: Here we go, something from ZDnet: Don't panic: The Internet is not collapsing, despite a spike in global 'attack' traffic Extra edit: Um, no mention about the fact that a lot of people were having trouble accessing the internet or what caused that? Oi. I don't think the article writer really paid attention.

More edit: Found this thread on another site where some people mentioned their internet going down: IPs unreachable from static IP

2  lightspeed23 2014-01-13

FFS. the site public-root.com has nothing to do with the REAL internet. It is not the REAL root server.

This is probably why it was removed from /r/technology, because the title is misleading.

2  33degree 2014-01-13

Already been removed from /r/technology.... what the fuck....

2  CptJackHarkness 2014-01-13

What time would this have been for Central Time Zone? I was on the internet all day yesterday and till almost 2am this morning and I noticed nothing.

2  Bipolarruledout 2014-01-13

Relax, the NSA is just installing more beam splicers. The links should be back up soon.

/My VoIP provider seems to be down. No error message, page just won't load.

2  Nogrim 2014-01-13

you probably just got your equivalent to the Chinese firewall lol

1  durkadurkdurka 2014-01-13

The Great Firewall

1  Nogrim 2014-01-13

except this one doesn't block it just records

1  Rdns 2014-01-13

Can confirm riot was down

1  kyndo 2014-01-13

didn't we recently have a solar flare, guys? could it be that?

3  Scoled321 2014-01-13

Flare could possibly squash satellite comms, but not fiber and copper. Would kill some internet, but I don't think it would take out half of the U.S.

Source: Ex military comm guy.

2  NominalCaboose 2014-01-13

I thought solar flares did affect copper wiring?

1  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

1  NominalCaboose 2014-01-13

I'm not familiar with that term.

1  Scoled321 2014-01-13

Not as far as I know, at least not to the point that it would take down internet. Maybe copper that wasn't properly grounded, but in 20 years, I never ran into a problem with solar flairs and copper.

1  NominalCaboose 2014-01-13

Hmm thanks for the input. I don't have anything solid I'm going off of I just seem to recall hearing that at some point. My mind probably just misconstrued the memory.

1  53595 2014-01-13

My internet was fine, but when trying to connect to some Payday 2 lobbies the connection wouldn't go through. Edit: Maybe some of the wires on the backbone of the internet need to be replaced.

1  Xizithei 2014-01-13

The only site I could update/access was Facebook at that time.

1  Zebraton 2014-01-13

Maybe the NSA shut down PRISM and replaced it with a new system. Then they can go to congress and say they shut down PRISM. Tada! No more worries American peoples, all sunshine and roses now...

// Just a thought.

1  DunDerD 2014-01-13

So I guess it was any site that uses Amazon Web Service. Could it have just been some fuck up with them?

1  Boonaki 2014-01-13

When all those middle eastern countries went off line, that was the CIA sub tapping into the underwater fiber cables.

1  lowpunk 2014-01-13

Comcast in north Mississippi was on an off a bit after 2 ish.. It was running really slow.

1  No_biggie456 2014-01-13

USA Mountain time approx 8:15 I was watching A video with my son and had to restart the computer. What time zone are you in?

1  chromofilmblurs 2014-01-13

My internet has been down all day. But apparently mediacom has a huge outage covering iowa, wisonsin, minnesota, illinois, nebraska, missouri, and parts of california.

0  TomSwirly 2014-01-13

New York City here. No outages; I was up at that time. None of my European friends reported any outages.

Outages, even fairly large ones, happen with depressing regularity. No need to postulate anything beyond "ineptness". In particular, there's no regulatory penalty for "short" outages like this to consumers, so it really doesn't cost the providers anything - so why do they care?

-2  [deleted] 2014-01-13

the aliens are coming..... their ship just interfered with a satellite. http://i.imgur.com/AcQFf6b.jpg

-4  redditeditard 2014-01-13

With a degree of skepticism that this wasn't US-generated, could this be the cyberterrorism threat from overseas, the DHS has been warning about?

-6  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

1  ENYAY7 2014-01-13

Nope thats just some shitty oil companies fault

0  Mrg13 2014-01-13

Still waiting?

I have seen 2-3 posts about it already.

-5  [deleted] 2014-01-13

[deleted]

7  Moops420 2014-01-13

boooo terrible suggestion Ted....

22  Ferrofluid 2014-01-13

more likely new W3C IP6 packet tracing software, their goal is unique IP/id number attached to every packet that travels the internet, so everything is traceable back to the originator and also to the recipient.

the NSA's wet dream