Thursday: Internet outage eastern Europe Iran and Turkey

Sat Dec 21 23:21:27 UTC 2019

--- sean at donelan.com wrote:
From: Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com>

I hadn't seen messages about this Internet outage affecting multiple 
countries (Eastern Europe, Turkey and Iran) from Thursday.

Multiple fiber cuts affecting major parts of sub-continents don't happen 
as much any more. Yes, I still remember the day of FIVE (5) simultaneous, 
trans-continental fiber cuts in the USA.  I was busy :-)

I don't know if Internet route diversity has improved... or people aren't 
sending me messages about them anymore.
---------------------------------

I have become quite interested in this lately.  I don't send them
to the list as no one seemed interested when I sent them before.  
For example, India as been turning off the internet like they turn 
the lights:

https://internetshutdowns.in/

Kashmir has been without internet for over 100 days:

https://guardian.ng/news/world/restive-kashmir-marks-100-days-since-india-stripped-autonomy/

Just think how you'd do anything without internet for 100+ days!

------------------------------------
Usually after a country as 3 or 4 major egress points, large-scale 
unintentional internet outages are relatively rare. Countries with only 
1 or 2 egress points still have lots of problems.
------------------------------------

I'm not so sure 3-4 is a large enough number.  Many countries are
copying China in information repression (among other things) which 
includes building in the ability to turn off internet access
(internationally as well as intranationally) as their network is 
built out. Funny that one thing something as large as a country 
is afraid of is normal folks talking to each other freely.  They
really don't like the end-to-end principle. :)

scott

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50851420

Severed fibre optic cables disrupted internet access in parts of eastern 
Europe, Iran and Turkey on Thursday.

The issue, which lasted for about two hours, was caused by multiple fibre 
cables being physically cut at the same time, a highly unusual thing to 
happen.
[...]