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Ankle-tapped by a link

When I sat down on Sunday morning to check my webmail, check on a few key international news sites and visit a handful of forums I regularly browse things did not go well.

Neither YahooMail nor Google were accessible.

A quick reboot of modem and PC changed nothing.

A little more investigation showed that some local sites worked fine (TradeMe for instance), some half-worked (NZ Herald and Stuff) but some hardly got past the masthead before loading stopped.

A call to the Telecom DSL helpline informed me that some users were having difficulty browsing some websites

Hell, I could have told *them* that!

The pre-recorded message went on to say (and I paraphrase here) "don't bother waiting for a customer support person because it'll take forever and they won't be able to help anyway".

Callers were also told "we don't know what the hell's wrong and we've got no idea how long it'll take to fix it".

Marvelous!

Clearly there was a problem with the international gateway that feeds Telecom's version of the internet and the packet-loss from anything outside of NZ was so high as to effectively represent a complete disconnect.

So why were so many NZ-based websites failing to load properly?

Well in every case it was because they called on page-elements that were not hosted on their own local servers. In fact, a single little link seemed in some cases to completely ankle-tap the loading of an entire page (when using Firefox under Linux anyway).

Google Analytics was one of the biggest offenders.

Any site that made calls to Google's tracking/analysis system seemed to stop dead in its tracks part-way through the loading process.

Other sites like the NZ Herald seemed to have their images served up by a box located outside NZ so even though their pages loaded, the pictures were missing.

Of course if your .co.nz website was hosted in the USA or elsewhere then it was also unaccessible to Kiwis on the Telecom DSL network.

So what can we learn from this outage?

Well, if you use Google Analytics or any other page elements that load from servers hosted outside NZ then even though your website maybe right here in Godzone, an outage in our international connectivity could still effectively knock it off line to other Kiwis.

Given the way that the reliability of Telecom's service seems to be decreasing (two *major* outages in as many months), it's almost becoming a good idea to reconsider those third-party page-elements or at least have a standby "no external elements" configuration that would allow your pages to load properly even if a natural disaster or bad-luck took out the Southern Cross Cable.

This would indeed be very sage advice to give one major website that was knocked off line by this international outage. Can you guess which one it was?

Yes, Telecom's own www.xtra.co.nz (which now redirects to nz.yahoo.com hosted in Australia) was effectively knocked out by this gateway failure and it seems they had no fallback plan to at least redirect requests to a locally hosted system status page. Duh!

Fortunately for Telecom it happened on a Sunday morning, when most sensible people were doing anything other than trying to browse the web. If it had happened 24 hours later then a whole lot more people would have been very angry and the fallout from this failure might have been far worse for Telecom.

Although outages of this magnitude will (hopefully) remain relatively rare, when they do happen it really hammers home just how dependent we've become on this thing called the internet.

What's more, as increasing amounts of data and functionality are committed to "the cloud", the effect of such outages will become even more widely felt and do more damage.

Come on Telecom, it's really time you lifted your game.

Be prepared to redirect traffic to a local server with useful information for your customers whenever the international gateway causes your regular site to disappear.

How about investing some of those billions you claim to be spending on your DSL network in a little redundancy where there are critical single points of failure (so customers aren't left without service for hours at a time).

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