Fire Takes Azerbaijan Offline (datacenterdynamics.com)

judgecorp writes: On Monday, 90 percent of Azerbaijan lost Internet access, due to a fire at one data center in Baku, the capital of the former Soviet Republic. Cables caught fire at the Delta Telecom facility, and international providers including NTT and Telecom Italia all lost service for nearly eight hours. Some interesting snippets: Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic that has seen rapid development thanks to its rich oil and gas reserves. The country has been running several projects aimed at modernizing its communications infrastructure, including participation in Trans-Eurasian Information Highway (TASIM). ... At about 16:10 on Monday, consumers, businesses and government agencies across Azerbaijan suddenly lost their connections to the Internet. Banks couldn’t make domestic money transfers, and even Point-of-Sale terminals were not working. ... Interestingly, no international traffic flowing though Azerbaijan was affected by the outage. “Transmission channels to Georgia, Iran, and the Middle East were working at full capacity,” Iltimas Mammadov, the minister of communications, told AzerNews.

Comments

Goes through one spot for a reason

[rahvin112]

The entire countries internet goes through a single building for a reason and it's not cost. They've not forgot their KGB roots.

Re:Goes through one spot for a reason

[Aaden42]

Single point to take the entire country offline?

CLOSED: Works as designed.

Re:Goes through one spot for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

It is because of cost. The US has more sites and the monitoring works just fine. China is probably the same.
Not that there's anything wrong with keeping costs down. I don't know Azerbaijan, but maybe 99,9999% uptime is not their top priority.

Re:Goes through one spot for a reason

[bobbied]

Actually, it's most likely because they didn't think of physical location redundancy... I've seen "redundant" set ups which where strictly maintained within a building get totally undone the second the fiber runs get mounted on the same poles to cross the street before they split and when their separate ways. Nobody was paying attention until a dump truck accidentally snagged both fiber runs and yanked them down the street, disconnecting both redundant fibers in one accident.

So, where it may have started as a KGB thing, nobody really thought though how their redundant design on paper, fell to a single physical event because they didn't maintain enough separation. Or, maybe it just was the NSA, providing low cost engineering services to keep them under their thumb?

Re:Route around problems

[RavenLrD20k]

Can't route around a horrible network design. 90% of the country's network was all routed to a single building with evidently no redundant links. Great for spying...not so great for disaster recovery and avoidance. But there's good news on multiple levels: The rest of the world's network didn't go down because of it!

Re: They should have used APPS!

[ModernGeek]

Yeah, why use these data centers when you can just put your data in the cloud?

For Context

[avandesande]

Pennsylvania:
46,055 sq mi
12,787,209 population

Azerbaijan:
33,436 sq mi
9,624,900 population

Re:For Context

[Anonymous Coward]

Pennsylvania:
12 letters
Starts with a P

Azerbaijan:
10 letters
Starts with an A

Re:95% muslim country can't keep basic infrastruct

[unixisc]

I am the first person to criticize Muslims, but people of the ex Soviet Republics are just nominal Muslims - nothing like the Quran thumpers that you'll find in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or Iran. In fact, most of them also recognize Israel and have full diplomatic relations w/ Israel - something that's unthinkable for most Muslim countries.

Also, while I'm no fan of Communism either, that's the one thing that has kept the stans - particularly Uzbekistan - from becoming an Islamic regime like Afghanistan.

Re:Part of WHERE?

[unixisc]

The thing about Azerbaijan, Turkey and the stans is that the secular elements of those countries see themselves as a part of Europe, while the Islamic elements see them as a part of the medieval Timuride, Seljuk or Ottoman empires. (I'm not including Tajikistan in this analysis, since that country, despite being Sunni, is culturally more allied to Iran).

Azerbaijan is Shi'ite like Iran, but Turkic, like 4 of the stans and Turkey. Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen and Uzbek are all Sunnite and Turkic. Turkey was a secular country since Kemal Ataturk, but has reverted to being an Islamic country under Erdogan, and is past the point where it considers itself a part of Europe. However, Azerbaijan and the other stans still have secular Soviet era quasi-democracies, and those parts still consider themselves a part of Europe, as opposed to the Middle East or Central Asia.

Personally, I group Turkey along w/ Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as the Turkic world, just like the Arabs have the Arab world - everything from Iraq to Morocco. Azerbaijan and Tajikistan are oddballs - Azerbaijan being Turkic but Shi'ite, while Tajikistan is Farsi but Sunnite. So these 2 could either be influenced by Iran or Turkey, but at this point, both those countries are Islamic, and the differences just theological

Bummer

[nospam007]

Seems like their data center didn't have a firewall.