Last Monday evening — 12 November 2018 — Google and a number of other services experienced a 74 minute outage. Incidents like this only serve to demonstrate just how much frailty is involved in how packets get from one point on the Internet to another.
The Story of Two Outages
Over the last two days, Cloudflare observed two events that had effects on global Internet traffic levels. Cloudflare handles approximately 10% of all Internet requests, so we have significant visibility into traffic from countries and networks across the world.
Power outage hits the island of Taiwan. Here’s what we learned.
At approximately 4:50pm local time (8:50am UTC) August 15, a major unexpected power outage hit the island of Taiwan with a significant amount of its power generation facilities going down.
Not one, not two, but three undersea cables cut in Jersey
Sometime before midnight Monday (UK local time) a ship dropped its anchor and broke, not one, not two, but three undersea cables serving the island of Jersey in the English Channel.
How the Dyn outage affected Cloudflare
Last Friday the popular DNS service Dyn suffered three waves of DDoS attacks that affected users first on the East Coast of the US, and later users worldwide.