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Blackout Worse For Internet Than Previously Thought?
An anonymous reader writes "Renesys (the people who previously brought you cool animated graphs of the US/Canada power outage has a new report out. It challenges the widely
held belief that the Internet was largely unaffected by the power outage. Lots of important networks lost connectivity, including banks, hospitals, government organizations and investment funds. There's a cool appendix on the huge Italian power outage in September as well. They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure."
It has always seemed to me that the internet isn't all that de-centralized, but a few major companies ran most of the backbones. Since it isn't a huge ad-hoc network, most of the data for an area probably goes out through no more than 5 connections. Especially in rual areas, I wouldn't doubt that at least one routing station in each of those chains doesn't have good long term backup facilities.
or generators. It takes large battery capacity to sustain long uptimes when htere is a facilities power outage.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Ready or not, the internet is increasingly being used for critical infrastructure. At best, failures like the power outage should motivate governments and industry to bolster the internet up to where it needs to be for reliability standards.
Exactly how does one system's dependance on a critical infrastructure (the power grid) and it's failure when that infrastructure fails imply that it's not ready?
Bah, I could have told you that. I work for an ISP that serves 15 states. I get calls from people who put 100% of their business into a DSL line - with no backup to other carriers or mediums. When a hardware failure or trunk line failure occures - they go postal.
Sorry, but uptime is not 100% never was, never will be - plan for it, or deal with it when your connection goes down.
Even though we have multiple connections to the backbone - local trunks can go down. Aka backhoe attacks on burried fiber, or dove hunters blasting pole run fiber (don't laugh - it happened last week). If you don't have a backup DSL,ISDN, or heck even dialup connection for your business - then stfu and wait while we repair.
And don't even get me started on residential accounts that call in 'I use this for work I need it up now - send someone out today.' And it's Sunday evening... no - you didn't pay for a business account, so you get residential service levels which include 24-72 hour turn around on repairs.
If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?
I'm not saying there isn't other evidence that would support such a conclusion, but the real failure here was the power infrastructure, upon which the net relied "critically" in the first place...
The reason everybody said that the internet survived was that they were able to visit most of the sites they cared about during the blackout. The chart seems to show that many links and servers were down (presumably without power) during the blackout (including some major components of the internet), yet most people basically unaffected. This seems to suggest that as long as the server itself isn't in the middle of a blackout, the Internet can survive rather well. How many of your learned about the blackout from Slashdot or some other online news source?
I read the internet for the articles.
Air Canada lost it's reservations/bookings/everything servers, and couldn't operate anything approaching normally for one reason. The servers were based in the midst of the blackout.
Out here on the left coast, there were no effects. So why, don't international org.s and government departments have duplicate facilities on independant grids? That's always bugged me.
bwh
The people affected by the downed routers were people who were in the blackout and couldn't turn on their computers anyway, so it doesn't matter that those machines were down. People outside the blackout were able to route around it, and THAT is the relevant part of the statement that the internet did well during the blackout.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I work in a hospital in Toronto. There were almost NO facilities or services that functioned in the early parts of the blackout. Would you claim phones are a critical infrastructure? It's true that they worked during the power outage, but very quickly all the phone networks were too congested to provide service - this lasted for several hours. Radio stations continued to broadcast until their backups ran out and we were left with dead air. Thankfully, the hospitals had sufficient emergency generation to support several days without external power, but I wonder how could such a heavy power consumer as the internet rely on backup? It is really a question of "how many other essential services require internet connectivity during a blackout", because every citizen surely doesn't need it right now.
Newsflash: the internet is already critical infrastructure, and the power grid that failed is critical infrastructure and has been for the better part of a Century.
If you're saying that lack of failure defines whether something is critical or ready to be critical then I guess by that definition the electrical distribution grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure. That is preposterous because it is and manages quite nicely for the most part. The rest is down to cost benefit.
They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
Huh? It would seem to me that the fucking power grid is not yet ready to be critical infrastructure but hey, here we are. Shit. There is nothing in the world (except for the sun, oceans, etc.) that is 100.00000% dependable.
Our top story tonight: humans, human inventions imperfect. Tomorrow: sky blue, water wet.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
> They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
So. They conclude that the internet is supposed to be more reliable than the power grid...or else it's not ready for prime-time?
Sounds like they're setting their standards a bit too high.
Really? It already is a mission critical infrastructure for my company and most others, I suspect. When some idiot with a backhoe takes the region down for a few hours, we're in serious doo-doo (no second carrier where I am). We switch to ye ole spreadsheet as a backup, but we're crippled without Internet access.
I agree with the article - there are some serious architectural flaws that need to be addressed; however, fact of the matter is that the internet has already become a mission critical technology despite these shortcomings.
I work for a fortune 500 company based in Cleveland Ohio, when the power went out, plants in Ky, Tn, Mi, Ar, Ms and in field offices all across the nation had problems because the main computer was down. They had generators but since nobody knew how long the outage would last they only ran critical functions to conserve. Several of the plants shut down departments because they rely on internet access too much. If it would have lasted longer, it would even have affected payroll-then I would have been very upset.
Think of the number of manufacturer plants whose headquarters are based in the area of the outage and rely on the internet for communications. think of what this could have done to the economy.