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Electricity Outage Puts Routing to a Tough Test

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-ahead-and-replicate-the-meme dept.

infofarmer writes "Today at about 11:30 MSD (GMT+4) a major electricity outage in Moscow, Russia brought new meanings to words like "uninterruptible", "redundant" and "uptime" for network administrators, who haven't experienced such harsh and unexpected power failures since the USSR got its Internet connection. Half of the city is totally out of electricity - including subway and the most important traffic exchange point, half of the top russian sites went down, including www.mail.ru, www.rambler.ru, www.lenta.ru, some of them haven't been brought up yet. IP packets going from ADSL users in Moscow to some local sites got rerouted to somewhere in London and then back to Scandinavia, where they met their "No route to host" deadend. Other routers found themselves in a loopback, which made many packets get dropped with TTL expired. The point is that most of popular servers have got two or three mainline Internet connections, but lack of BGP/RIP2/whatever configuration resulted in packets losing their way to hosts."

6 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Probably unrelated by SIGALRM · · Score: 5, Funny
    half of the top russian sites went down, including www.mail.ru, www.rambler.ru, www.lenta.ru, some of them haven't been brought up yet.
    And in other news, spam volumes suddenly and unexpectedly plummeted.
    --
    Sigs cause cancer.
  2. In soviet russia... by Winckle · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh nevermind...

    1. Re:In soviet russia... by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Funny

      Power fails you.

  3. Yes, but... by rewt66 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did kremvax stay up?

  4. Re:No spam for 4 hours! by joeytmann · · Score: 5, Funny

    Whats your email addres?

    --
    Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
  5. I think this is a "political outage" of some sort by melted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's a Russian politician of Yeltsin era, Anatoly Chubais who is in charge of RAO UES Russia (which is an uber-organization controlling production and distribution of energy in Russia).

    While the guy is not as powerful as he was a few years ago, he still poses a significant threat to Putin's third (and fourth, and so on) term presidency, and further concentration of power in Putin's hands.

    So within half a few hours of outage, Putin blamed Chubais directly for this, and Russian justice dept opened up a criminal case against him. If you know anything about Russia, you know that Russian DOJ (Prokuratura) doesn't start criminal cases against wealthy and powerfull businessmen and politicians unless instructed to do so by Putin.

    So I'd bet dollars against donuts that this outage was caused by folks from Lubyanka (FSB aka KGB) purely to remove Chubais, and if cards play well maybe even give him a lengthy prison term.