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Comment by funwithjustin | Hacker News Reader

Serious question - what could cause this? I don't know much about network configuration or DNS. Could it be a coordinated attack on Comcast's infrastructure somewhere? Seems a little crazy that they'd be experiencing problem nation-wide with no redundancy baked into their system.

I tried manually flipping over to Google's DNS servers with the same result.

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Since we are resolving dns, we know its not a dns issue. This appears to be pack loss / routing issue. The most likely cause of this is someone has leaked internal routes, or leaked bgp.

I don't see anything from bgpmon (https://twitter.com/bgpmon) or bgpstream (https://twitter.com/bgpstream) for North America though. There have been multiple bgp leaks today but nothing that I can see that effects comcast/rnc.

It does appear at least some site I'm seeing are being routed through Europe.

  traceroute kayak.com
  traceroute to kayak.com (185.6.169.69), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
   2  96.120.68.17 (96.120.68.17)  7.840 ms  8.995 ms  8.354 ms
   3  96.108.154.229 (96.108.154.229)  8.136 ms  9.174 ms  8.325 ms
   4  be-23-sur03.westroxbury.ma.boston.comcast.net (69.139.221.226)  9.879 ms  7.478 ms  7.667 ms
   5  be-20-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net (68.85.106.21)  9.527 ms  12.000 ms  8.524 ms
   6  * * *
   7  ae-1-16.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (4.69.142.129)  118.578 ms  118.947 ms  118.229 ms
   8  ae-1-16.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (4.69.142.129)  127.931 ms  116.424 ms  117.852 ms
   9  nexellent-a.bar1.zurich1.level3.net (213.242.82.110)  118.340 ms  117.555 ms  115.950 ms

Seems like the UK and Germany are under relatively heavy load right now.

https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/...

Thanks for the info. How on earth could Comcast have a single point of failure for their entire network nation-wide?

Would this suggest that there's possibly something like a MITM attack going on that's hijacking their traffic somewhere?

>Thanks for the info. How on earth could Comcast have a single point of failure for their entire network nation-wide?

I guess I've been a Comcast customer too long given I don't even understand your question. It would seem more shocking if it were not something like this.

I'm in the SF Bay Area and after looking at traceroutes and packet loss it looks like something at PAIX has failed between Comcast, Hurricane Electric, NTT, and others.

A coordinated attack could be a cause of something like this, but more often than not it's a hardware or power failure at a critical exchange like PAO, DFW, IAD, etc. Also possible, human error in turning down traffic to certain servers, networks, and IP ranges.

> what could cause this?

It could be ...

The Backhoe, The Internet's Natural Enemy (2006)

https://it.slashdot.org/story/06/01/19/1643215/the-backhoe-t...

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