Fat-fingered Level 3 techie reduces internet to level zero: Glitch knocks out connections A fat-fingered configuration blunder at Level 3 temporarily sent a chunk of internet connectivity in America and the wider world to level zero on Monday. The global backbone provider admitted it was at fault for rolling outages that have plagued big patches of US this morning, West Coast time, particularly for Comcast …
I can see that putting it in the cloud loses you access if te Internet falls over. But the internet doesn't have to fall over.
Back in my Telewest days we, in response to failures by people ike Level 3, put in resilient links with different providers, through different geographic touchpoints. It wasn't perfect but we could keep soomething going if Level 3 or Telecity went down when previously we just had to look at the queue on the phones and shrug.
Hopefully thhings are less reliant on the two of tem since the old days.
I use Microsoft's cloud service - I don't have any control over who their backbone is and what the SLAs are. If pre-cloud I had a contract with a specific online service I would likely know where my data was, and who to call when it went wrong.
Instead I find out from el'reg how and why MSFT is fscked - while MSFT's own service page is saying "we are investigating reports of outages"
My old ISP / Datacenter on the South Coast did that.. IIRC correctly they once had a failure on the primary backbone provider, failed-over the secondary, a few minutes later this went TITSUPs.
Turned out, the backup link got saturated, as they'd being progressively increasing their customer base and increasing the primary, but "forgot" to upgrade the secondary.
More like a series of tubes.
I know that one of the companies that Level 3 borged some years ago boasted having it's own transit traffic infrastructure from Tokyo to London. I used to work for said company nearly twenty years ago, and we had a few 'whoopsie' moments like that. as an example:
On of the router jockeys goofed one fine day and reconfigure an access router's default route to one of the customer's connection. Fortunately, the router crashed and rebooted before he could commit the configuration, but it was still a goof. A sign was put over his desk that said "We bring the Internet TO YOU!" as punishment. :D
@j Cook,
"I know that one of the companies that Level 3 borged some years ago boasted having it's own transit traffic infrastructure from Tokyo to London. I used to work for said company nearly twenty years ago, and we had a few 'whoopsie' moments like that. as an example:"
would that company be Global Crossing?
Not backbone, but worked for a small business that paid for two circuits for redundancy. Found out both were on the same phone poles when a car took down a pole. Also found out they were going through the same hardware.
I guess you pay for the peace of mind - and you have it, until your connection goes down.
@Etatdame
you need to pay for diversity and then have your ISP prove the link is actually diverse, separate PoP's / Exchanges, separate non over lapping routes to your building, separate routes into your building preferably opposite ends etc.
it gets interesting when you want 2 different ISP's to supply diverse routes to each other, as their planners both want to go the easy route.
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