After a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month in June, the number and severity of significant Internet disruptions observed in July was markedly lower. The month was book-ended by exam-related outages, while other observed connectivity disruptions were related to a massive power outage, severe weather, government direction, and fiber/cable issues. Several additional unattributed disruptions were also seen over the course of the month.
Continue reading →Author / davidbelson
Internet Disruption Report: June 2019
Simply put, June was a pretty rough month for the global Internet. In addition to all of the usual small/transient issues, there were quite a few significant disruptions that occurred over the course of the month. This month’s post covers government-mandated Internet shutdowns due to political unrest and national exams, disruptions due to cable damage, power outage-related Internet outages, two large route leaks, and a couple of localized disruptions (for good measure).
Continue reading →Internet Disruption Report: May 2019
Welcome to the first monthly Internet Disruption Report, covering May 2019. Over the course of the month, we observed Internet disruptions caused by damaged submarine and terrestrial cables, likely issues with satellite connectivity, and problems caused by weather events. In addition, there were also a number of notable disruptions observed during the month with other or unknown root causes.
Continue reading →Multi-Hour Disruption at China Telecom
On May 13, Oracle Internet Intelligence posted the following Tweet:
Identifying and Visualizing Internet Disruptions
When an Internet disruption occurs, it is presumably obvious to the impacted parties as their favorite Web sites and applications immediately become unreachable, video/voice/text messaging apps fail to connect, and popular streaming media sites become unavailable. Â However, how can we as external observers know that this disruption has taken place, and how can we determine its scope?
About This Blog
As the founding editor of Akamai’s State of the Internet/Connectivity Report, one of the topics that I regularly covered, both in the report and on social media, was Internet disruptions. More specifically, we showed how these disruptions were visible through changes in traffic to the Akamai platform from the impacted country.
About a year after I joined Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team, we launched the Internet Intelligence Map – a publicly available resource that used insights from traceroutes, BGP, and DNS traffic to detect and highlight Internet disruptions at both a country and network (ASN) level. Based on that data, I published monthly “Last Month In Internet Intelligence” blog posts that covered many of these disruptions, including information about the root causes. For disruptions related to a well-publicized event (like a power outage or severe weather), this information is easy to find. However, in other cases, significant research is necessary to figure out what happened. (And the root causes of many disruptions remain unattributed, in part because network operators often do not publicly share outage information.)
I left Oracle in March 2019, but continue to have a strong interest in Internet disruptions and why they occur. A need remains for regularly aggregated coverage of Internet disruptions taking place in countries around the world, and this blog is intended to address that need.
Internet Disruption Report 