Centurylink having a bad morning?

Drew Weaver drew.weaver at thenap.com
Mon Aug 31 16:35:42 UTC 2020


I also found the part where they mention that a lot of hosting companies only have one uplink to be quizzical and also the fact that he goes pretty close to implying that its Centurylink’s customers fault for not having multiple paths to Cloudflare that don’t touch Centurylink a bit puzzling. It could have just been poorly written.


From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+drew.weaver=thenap.com at nanog.org> On Behalf Of Tom Beecher
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2020 9:26 AM
To: Hank Nussbacher <hank at interall.co.il>
Cc: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Centurylink having a bad morning?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/analysis-of-todays-centurylink-level-3-outage/

I definitely found Mr. Prince's writing about yesterday's events fascinating.

Verizon makes a mistake with BGP filters that allows a secondary mistake from leaked "optimizer" routes to propagate, and Mr. Prince takes every opportunity to lob large chunks of granite about how terrible they are.

L3 allows an erroneous flowspec announcement to cause massive global connectivity issues, and Mr. Prince shrugs and says "Incidents happen."





On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 1:15 AM Hank Nussbacher <hank at interall.co.il<mailto:hank at interall.co.il>> wrote:
On 30/08/2020 20:08, Baldur Norddahl wrote:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/analysis-of-todays-centurylink-level-3-outage/

Sounds like Flowspec possibly blocking tcp/179 might be the cause.

But that is Cloudflare speculation.

Regards,
Hank
Caveat: The views expressed above are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer

An outage is what it is. I am not worried about outages. We have multiple transits to deal with that.

It is the keep announcing prefixes after withdrawal from peers and customers that is the huge problem here. That is killing all the effort and money I put into having redundancy. It is sabotage of my network after I cut the ties. I do not want to be a customer at an outlet who has a system that will do that. Luckily we do not currently have a contract and now they will have to convince me it is safe for me to make a contract with them. If that is impossible I guess I won't be getting a contract with them.

But I disagree in that it would be impossible. They need to make a good report telling exactly what went wrong and how they changed the design, so something like this can not happen again. The basic design of BGP is such that this should not happen easily if at all. They did something unwise. Did they make a route reflector based on a database or something?

Regards,

Baldur

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 5:13 PM Mike Bolitho <mikebolitho at gmail.com<mailto:mikebolitho at gmail.com>> wrote:
Exactly. And asking that they somehow prove this won't happen again is impossible.
- Mike Bolitho

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 8:10 AM Drew Weaver <drew.weaver at thenap.com<mailto:drew.weaver at thenap.com>> wrote:
I’m not defending them but I am sure it isn’t intentional.

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+drew.weaver=thenap.com at nanog.org<mailto:thenap.com at nanog.org>> On Behalf Of Baldur Norddahl
Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2020 9:28 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Centurylink having a bad morning?

How is that acceptable behaviour? I shall remember never to make a contract with these guys until they can prove that they won't advertise my prefixes after I pull them. Under any circumstances.

søn. 30. aug. 2020 15.14 skrev Joseph Jenkins <joe at breathe-underwater.com<mailto:joe at breathe-underwater.com>>:
Finally got through on their support line and spoke to level1. The only thing the tech could say was it was an issue with BGP route reflectors and it started about 3am(pacific). They were still trying to isolate the issue. I've tried failing over my circuits and no go, the traffic just dies as L3 won't stop advertising my routes.

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 5:21 AM Drew Weaver via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>> wrote:
Hello,

Woke up this morning to a bunch of reports of issues with connectivity had to shut down some Level3/CTL connections to get it to return to normal.

As of right now their support portal won’t load: https://www.centurylink.com/business/login/

Just wondering what others are seeing.


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