When the Entire Internet Seems to Break At Once

http://www.theatlantic.com ^ | Oct 21 2016 | Robinson Meyer and Adrienne Lafrance

[Beowulf9]

For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States.

More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others.

How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?

[Gideon7]

Level 3 is freaking huge. They have reserve bandwidth beyond your imagination, and they have some very smart people running it. Their infosec is literally military grade (They run milnet for the DoD IIRC).

Hacking Dyn is kid stuff in comparison. It happened to be a convenient single point of failure due to companies going cheap and outsourcing their DNS to save a few bucks and the bad guys exploited it. You can be sure that IT guys at the major sites are going to make darn sure it never happens again.

[Crimson Elephant]

Yep. A surprise is in store.

[NFHale]

Put nothing past the globalist fascists.

[RayChuang88]

That is why my desktop computer, laptop, Chromebook, iPad and iPhone use these DNS server addresses:

64.6.64.6 (Preferred--Verisign DNS)
8.8.4.4 (Secondary--Google Public DNS)

[Beowulf9]

Good observation.

Well isn’t it nice that no one out there is alarming the public because we might be the victim of Isis attacks or whatever terrorists are in those countries.

Let’s elect someone with a casual attitude toward security, eh?

[Road Warrior ‘04]

Tell me again who took over the internet just a few short weeks ago? Well, it isn’t the U.S. anymore!