Widespread Internet Outrages hit Northeast US

by Colin Berkshire

People should be outraged by this.

The Internet was designed to be robust, self healing, unstoppable. It was designed so if one route blocked traffic would get rerouted around the blockage. That was the most fundamental design principle.

The Internet was originally designed, and the protocols were designed for military purposes. The idea was that the loss of even a number of switches and links would cause no interruption in service.

So how is it that Verizon has managed to miss engineer their network so that a single fiber cut can take service out from Boston to New York? It strikes me as a spectacular piece of engineering to have been able to pull that one off.

Yet, here we are, discounting the whole thing as a fiber cable being cut. No alarm bells are going off inside of people’s heads.

Something has gone very, very wrong and how we have implemented the Internet in corporate land.

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Massive internet outage hits U.S. East Coast taking down Gmail, Slack, and Amazon AWS