I work the graveyard shift at a very large ISP. While most of you were probably sensibly in bed, there was a period from around 2 AM Eastern to about 4 AM Eastern where a huge segment of the internet was down in the U.S., due to what appears to have been a massive Denial of Service attack on a company called UUnet. It'll probably be on the news later; it's only 4 AM or so as I write this, and access to my own site has only just been restored.
To be clear, I didn't just say the ISP service I work for was down. I said a huge segment of the entire internet was down. People all over North America were experiencing this, and probably anyone outside of North America trying to surf to sites within North America saw it happen.
It was most impressive to watch. Rumors flew thickly in online chats, apparently, that it might be terrorists, but I very seriously doubt that. It may not even have been a DoS attack, but just technical problems. Still, one way or the other, it's interesting how much of the internet can be taken out by serious problems at just one backbone provider. I keep thinking that the internet's evolved beyond all that, but it only takes one incident like this to make me realize that, at rock bottom, the internet is still based on pretty simple and somewhat fragile technology.
* Update * Apparently the cause has been a Worm, and the problem has spread around the globe. Uunet was just the first victim. The BBC has more on the story. To no one's surprise, it's a Microsoft problem. (Thanks to Casey for the link.)
I ran into it. I've been up late watching a movie and decided to take a break and check your site. No go. My homepage wouldn't load, and Outlook couldn't contact my email server.
So I called RoadRunner help service and we tried the standard things. No go. I don't know why I decided to try something different; probably that the once or twice I've run into an actual problem with the cable modem service it was quickly (less than 5 minutes) fixed.
So I tried a site besides my homepage. It worked. The weird thing was that I could access some parts of the net, but not others. Strange...
I think it had to be multiple failures of something, Dean: the US tried to trash the network in Iraq during Desert Storm and just couldn't do it. Of course, that's what the protocols were designed for, so it's good to know it worked. Sort of. :)
There's an article in the NYT about scale-free networks. It is an off-shoot of a "new" (i.e., faddish) discipline called network theory:
Many natural phenomena, including traits like height and I.Q., tend to cluster around an average (producing the familiar bell curve distribution).
In contrast, scale-free networks go in for extremes: a few hubs — nodes with lots of links — and many more nodes with hardly any links at all. (Think of Google, the search engine, as a hub, and your personal homepage — which probably has just a few links — as an ordinary node.)
This discovery startled scientists. "People always knew there were networks but thought they were random," said one researcher. "To know they were nodes linked by hubs was very unexpected."
It also provoked a frenzy of research. For as Mr. Barabasi and his collaborator were able to show, the structure of scale-free networks has important practical implications. If you remove a few nodes at random, the network can still function normally. But if you remove one of the hubs, the results can be catastrophic.
Inspired by this insight, cancer researchers are now homing in on a cell's hub proteins in order to learn how to defend them from devastating attacks.
Epidemiologists studying sexually transmitted diseases are arguing that it makes more sense to identify and treat the hubs in the transmission network than to give drugs to everyone. You can read the whole article here. It requires registration and will not be available after about a week. For free, anyway.
From what we saw here, most of the problem was caused in Dallas.
No fooling. (I'm in MIchigan, in case anyone cares, and Casey's in Florida.)
About an hour ago, I couldn't get my own website to load, nor get my domain's e-mail, nor reach my domain host. TRACERT broke down in the DC-Baltimore area when I was checking it out. Finally about 15 minutes ago most everything came up fine.
Oddly, NetZero's password servers at the Atlanta-area dial-up portals also seem to be down, as well as the POP portal. Or maybe it's just me.
Apparently there is a worm aimed at port 1434 causing all this hassle.
I can tell you it affected several news agencies, and even here in Spain some news agencies and services were down. My satellite connection is still down. Officially, theyre telling us its a virus at using the old weakness in Microsoft. For what´s it worth, just to let u know that us here on the other side of the pond are also affected
Actually, Dean, I'm just north of Cincinnati in Ohio. :) You're probably thinking of the University of Miami, whereas I go to Miami University. Remember it this way: Miami was a university before Florida was a state. Heh.
The odd thing was: last night I couldn't even access the Miami server, even though it's physically only 20 miles away from me. I wonder how RoadRunner routed that?
I can access Miami's server's now, and they have a link to a BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2693925.stm
The sad part is that the vulnerability was identified back in July of 2002.
A lot of people like to crack on Microsoft products, but I've seen one comment over & over in different web conversations about this stuff: all the patches in the world aren't worth a damn if the system administrator won't apply them.
Remember it this way: Miami was a university before Florida was a state.
Ah. As it happens, that's the Indian tribe I'm descended from. They were mostly found in Ohio. So I shouldn't be surprised there's been a university named after them in that spot for a while.
Anyway, I find it interesting that this worm is still causing problems.
Washington Post has an article about the worm here.