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."

Comments

worked just fine here during blackout

[bbn]

I live in denmark and recently we had a blackout that lasted maybe 10 hours.

While I was unable to make any phone calls, I could get on the internet with GPRS and surf to our server with my laptop for as long as the laptop batteries lasted.

The server is hosted in a colo datacenter which was also in the middle of the affected area. We run a mud on the server, and most of the players are from USA. They never discovered the blackout as the datacenter went on emergency diesel backup and apparently knew to make business with backbone providers that also knew their stuff.

So to the people saying that internet can only route around blackout areas but not _through_ them, this is not true. Seems at least here in denmark all the infrastructure on the backbones got backup power and just keeps working when everyone else is busy lighting candles.

Re:Obvious?

[tmu]

The ability to observe the outage (sharply) through routing activity is definitely the part that we thought was coolest.

People are saying two different things here: 1) well, duh, if power is out lots of people can't connect to the web; 2) if the core of the internet routes around that who cares. These are both interesting points. Here are some thoughts:

1) We agree. That's what I though. But read the keynote press releases. Or just google on 'blackout Internet' and you'll find glowing stories about how 'the Internet' didn't even blip under the blackout. We prove pretty conclusively that this is incorrect.

2) The core of the Internet did, indeed, route around the outage. This is good. What is less good is that thousands of networks within the outage area lost connectivity, either due to lost power themselves, or upstreams that lost power (or telcos who lost battery backup on csu/dsu units, or whatever). These are *not* DSL customers (or that grade, anyway). All of these are BGP-speaking networks with their own Autonomous Systems and their own prefixes.

The fact that so many networks went down is significant, given that many organizations are coming to rely on the Internet as a critical communications infrastructure.

Re:And the power system is?

[Rick.C]

Pointing out that areas without power didn't have internet connectivity seems rather redundant to me.

For home users and small businesses, you are quite right. What about large businesses that invested in generators so they could stay online 24/7? They were prepared to remain online to conduct their business. They depended on the Internet and it failed them.

I work for a large bank. We were not hit by the power outage, but we were scrambling to find routes around the areas that were.

Re:And the power system is?

[orangesquid]

I think the implied problem was the connectivity that was provided by ISPs and backbone segments running off the affected sections of the power grid.

If the Internet were more redundant and ad-hoc (less backbone-centric), it would recover from problems better. That's how it was originally envisioned; unfortunately, the commercialization of NSFNet has largely destroyed this approach, for better or worse.

We have a more organized network, but it's very dependent on critical points because of it's multiplexing organization strategy, so when that fails...