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The internet broke (again)

A number of high-profile websites and services went down (again) last night.

Apparently, X (formerly Twitter), and ChatGPT were amongst the many affected by the outage, which lasted several hours.

Is it just me or are these "outages" becoming increasingly frequent in recent times?

We've been told that the internet is a robust system that "routes around damage" in a way that makes this sort of thing impossible... right?

Well that's true, at a basic level. However, it seems that we've been ruining the ability of the internet to re-route and sidestep failures in a number of ways.

Firstly we have "single points of failure" such as the DNS system. If the DNS is disrupted then, even though the data-paths remain unaffected, we lose the ability to connect to our favourite sites and services because there is no translation from "name" to "number".

Think of this as knowing someone has a phone but not knowing their number -- there's simply no way to ring them so they might as well be completely cut off.

Some of the more recent outages have involved DNS misconfigurations or failures and that have had widespread effects, especially when a critical piece of a network gets "wrong number" information from a badly configured DNS.

Last night's outages however, were a little different.

The problem appears to have been caused by CloudFlare, an extra layer that has been added to the basic internet so as to make it more resilient to things such as denial of service (DOS) attacks and such.

A huge number of very popular sites rely on CloudFlare to protect them from cyber-attacks and threats to their own networks. By acting as a filter, effectively screening out packets that are deemed invalid or malicious, CloudFlare provides a high level of immunity for those sites which might otherwise be brought to their knees or compromised by hackers or others with evil intent.

The downside however, is that when CloudFlare itself fails then no packets get through. In effect those sites which rely on that protective layer are effectively disconnected from the internet itself.

Yes, it becomes another single point of failure and the protection suddenly becomes the vulnerability.

We're constantly being told that cyberwarfare is a huge part of war and conflict these days. Russia and Ukraine are constantly exchanging cyber-bullets and fending off cyber-attacks as both nations attempt to infiltrate or destroy their opponent's digital infrastructure. Likewise, foreign state actors are waging a battle even in countries not at war. We regularly see stories claiming Chinese or N.Korean state hackers have breached the security of sensitive US or UK systems in an attempt to gather intelligence.

What was once a calm and peacefull highway for the exchange of (largely) academic information has become a battle field so I fully expect that huge online outages will become increasingly common, whether caused by incompetence and oversight or by malicious actions on the part of bad actors.

However, I have a solution... well multiple solutions...

Keep a few books around the place. Get a library card. Take quiet walks in a park somewhere and remember that there is life beyond the internet. Do not join the thronging masses who wail in the streets whenever Facebook goes down for more than 30 seconds. Enjoy "the real world^TM" and smile.

Carpe Diem folks!

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