How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage

Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."

Comments

Huh

[ScrewMaster]

This ought to be tagged as coming from the "Lack of Redundancy Department".

Re:Huh

[cheater512]

Look at Australia for the moment.
We have one line going from Brisbane to Hawaii and another from Sydney to New Zealand.
They are both part of the same network.

A few years back one of the cables got cut while the other was under maintenance.
All our internet was routed through the two western cables.

Do you realize how slow it was?
Dialup was severely affected and if you got 1kbps you were very lucky.
Thats just for a small 20million person country back in the day when everyone didn't have net.

Fast forward to today with high speed broadband and about 90 million people affected.
Yes data will be re-routed but it will probably be faster to snail mail Google asking for your search query.

Injustice

[QuickFox]

All those virus writers struggling so hard, and then a simple ship gets all the bragging rights.

Re:Injustice

[TheQuantumShift]

All it takes is one laid off programmer to get his captain's license....

Re:Injustice

[Tablizer]

All those virus writers struggling so hard, and then a simple ship gets all the bragging rights.

Some fisherman took "trolling the internet" a little too literally.

3rd cable cut

[vivekg]

So far they found 3 cable cuts. According to this BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm - A third submarine internet cable is severed in the Middle East, compounding global net problems.

Re:3rd cable cut

[aminorex]

Two in the Mediterranean, another between Suez and Dubai somewhere, which is not in the Mediterranean at all.
The nation of Iran appears to be entirely disconnected from the Internet by these events: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm

Re:3rd cable cut

[Skreems]

How reliable is that site? Because it also claims that Colombia and part of Germany are completely absent from the internet...

Wrong

[slashmojo]

Obviously this is the result of U2 manager Paul McGuinness calling on ISP's to disconnect the evil file sharers of the world..

"To great applause from the audience of music managers, McGuinness insisted that disconnection enforcement would work."

How right he was! ;)

Re:So It Wasn't The Evil US's Fault??!!

[bheer]

> I'd like to see those slashbots apologize for undermining the US at every turn and being so unpatriotic.

Not all Slashdotters are *from* the US, you insensitive clod! I, for one, am posting from Teheran University and don't see why I should have to

*NO CARRIER*

Send Them a Bill

[Detritus]

They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.

Re:Send Them a Bill

[Registered Coward v2]

They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.


Actually, ships are governed by maritime law, which is designed to protect and encourage commerce; I'm not sure if they even would be responsible for damage from an anchor to a cable lying on the seafloor. From my limited recollection, vessel owners liability is generally the value of the vessel (not including the cargo).

Re:Send Them a Bill

[linuxscrub]

I believe that many/all undersea cables are mapped.

Ships/captains plying international waters must have up-to-date info. If they damage a cable that is on the maps, they are responsible.

See the great WIRED article from Neal Stephanson on the laying of FLAG:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

OK, it's an article from 1996, but it's one of the best WIRED articles (and looong) ever (back before they were owned by Conde Nast)

L. Scrub

What?!?!

[mouko]

I thought we had agreed that it was George Bush that cut the cables. Did everyone change conspiracy theories while I was away?

That's no physical location map.

[the_other_chewey]

The image linked from the summary does not depict the physical locations of cables, but is a schematic of existing connections between points on the globe. The lines in that image have not much to do with where the cables actually are. A more realistic representation of (a subset of) the world's submarine cable networks would e.g. be this big PDF or, in a more comprehensive view, that one (sold for a mere $350 :-| ).

Re:That's no physical location map.

[jimmyswimmy]

Interesting drawing. I was amazed to see that Cuba has no subsea internet connection at all. It's kind of interesting to see one of the larger countries in the area completely circumnavigated like that. Out of curiousity I looked to see what connection they use, and it looks like a completely satellite-based service from newcom-intl.com, judging from the traceroute responses and the huge delays which occur at that hop. Neat.

Guess that's one way to avoid having your internet connection destroyed by an anchor...

Now, I am not talking about nuclear attacks...

[iamacat]

But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.

I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".

Re:Now, I am not talking about nuclear attacks...

[hcdejong]

True, but that ignores the economic reality, and a few more factors.
1. We're talking about (relatively) poor countries, so the budget for massively redundant infrastructure simply isn't there.
2. Cables across land are easy when the region you go through is politically stable. It's another matter when there's a war going on. For example, Egypt shares borders with Sudan, and a cable going West from Egypt would cross Algeria.
3. Cables across hundreds of km of undeveloped desert aren't cheap to install or maintain. It's much easier along existing infrastructure, but even then it's an expensive business.
4. Items 1 and 3 combined mean that you'll get a few high-capacity links instead of multiple smaller-capacity links.
5. The telecom tradition of 100% uptime is typical of first-world countries. In Africa, people tend to be more accepting of the occasional outage. See #1.

Also, how much redundancy is enough? Currently, Egypt has 3 major links (FLAG, SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4) to Europe, and 3 (the same cables) to Asia. They're all separated, so a single incident would take out (ballpark) 1/6 of their bandwidth. Severing 3 cables in one week falls under 'shit happens', IMO.

Oh noes, teh pollutions.

[blacklabelsk8er]

Think of all the 1's and 0's flowing into the ocean right now?! The cost to the environment here is appalling. Someone turn the valves on that internet backbone, stat! Think about the animals!

Re:Oh noes, teh pollutions.

[n6kuy]

Yeah, and now we're gonna hafta drain the ocean so we can clean up that mess!

Should be: How bad network design...

[ZWithaPGGB]

Caused by politics and telco monopolies created a network without redundancy. A combination of the infeasibility, due to the political situation, of overland links through the middle east and central Asia, and the hidebound Indian telco not providing sufficient redundancy in connections out of the country, never mind the total misallocation of resources inside it, are the cause of this. TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network.

Good news for US and European IT workers though: that buffoon who offshored your jobs has to explain why the IT department has been down for a few days. I guarantee the CEO/CFO is not amused that he can't get to SAP, or that the stores can't upload, or that whatever other mission critical system is off-line isn't working.

See it to believe it

[__aaqvdr516]

The cable that was cut is in a common anchoring point for ships waiting to transit the Suez. The Suez canal is only large enough to allow transit in one direction, which leads to a pileup of sorts at one end to the "lake" in the center. As a point of reference here's a picture of a US carrier entering the Suez canal. https://segue.atlas.uiuc.edu/index.php?action=site&site=rrosenb2

Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?

Re:See it to believe it

[anticypher]

I don't know where you are getting your information from, but hire a proctologist to put it back for you.

There are no fibres running on the bottom of the Suez canal, all the fibres take an overland route. There are three major Egyptian landing areas in the Mediterranean, two west of Al Iskandariyah (Alexandria), and one to the east of Port Said, well away from the entry to the canal. The cable routes overland are now quite redundant, as cable cuts happen so often in Egypt every company now has at least two routes with circuit protection. On the Red Sea side, there are at least two landing points, at Abadiya and one across from there on the eastern side of the sea.

All the cable landing zones are quite well marked on shipping charts (my google skills have failed me, I can't find an online chart site for Egypt, similar to this one for the UK). Ships are not supposed to drop anchor in those zones, no fishing allowed, no recreational boating, etc. At least in Europe, boaters can get a pretty heavy fine for dropping anchor in a restricted area, big enough that any captain who values his vessel/career knows to stay out of the areas. I doubt Egypt has such draconian enforcement, but the charts are clearly marked.

For the two cuts off of Al Iskandariyah, there was a large storm in the eastern Med the day of the cuts, gale force 7 winds with large swells. So the local authority moved the anchorage area to west of Al Iskandariyah, and many ships ended up anchoring in the restricted zone, dragging their anchors as they were pulled along by the strong easterly winds.

Only one cable near Egypt was cut at first, the second major cut was near France, which took out FLAG. There was then a third cut in the Egypt area, of the same FLAG fibre, but by a different ship dragging anchor. So FLAG got hit double hard.

The most recent cut was somewhere down off of Dubai, which took out even more capacity. It's been an interesting week, as European banking traffic to the Emirates now has to flow all the way around the world the wrong way, and many of the intermediate carriers are choking on the traffic.

the AC

"Tha facts have come out:"

[cicho]

The article has this to say on the cause of the damage:

"According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday."

According to whose reports? Published where? What was the name of the ship? How was it discovered that it caused all the damage? Is the same ship also responsible for the third cable cut, which did not occur in the Mediterranean, and later than Wednesday?

This what you refer to as "facts". I sure hope you intended sarcasm.

Cable made out of Irony

[Tablizer]

They have a survey on that page: "Have you been affected by the disruption to internet services? You can tell us your experiences using the form below:"

Something tells me such a survey would not be very scientific.