A fiber cut auto heals automatically via bgp. Absolutely no truth in this claim from verizon.
Meanwhile google, zoom, aws, and microsoft went down?
There isn't any shared datacenters here. There's at least 3 distinct datacenters.
So what's the truth? what actually went down?
Too much capacity is centralized in certain providers, and if they go down there simply is no backup route that can handle the same traffic patterns.
I think this revealed that there is insufficient failover capacity.
I've even seen where playing it safe while planning to back out of a manual fix used during a weird outage (circuit went down in one direction or something, just needed to be manually shutdown to re-route everything) brought down the entire network when another outage happened before that evening, i.e. most redundancy plans protect against single failures, not all combination of two failures. They wanted to do all planned changes after business hours, like manually swinging traffic back to the primary hub site. They didn't check the weather on the other side of the country, and the power at their new super-duper data center went down that afternoon during a thunderstorm...
I wonder what percentage of fiber cuts don't cause noticeable outages. We'll never know, unless they let us root around in their ticket system.
As a customer it is fair to judge them on what you see, though. Some telcos screw up more than others. Best to use two.
(Typed over my phone, cuz my broadband is down!)
Every time an outage like this happens without a following postmortem, I wonder if it was a surveillance oopsie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
Why is it that conspiracy theories seem to always require a more complex answer than the truth?
My point is, the Internet rerouting around damage doesn't explain the slowdown, mostly because it happened days after, not immediately, meaning the damaged infrastructure was not critical for the global internet.
The attacks unleashed a huge intelligence operation, and it's reasonable to expect a parallel intelligence operation online. If the latter caused a traffic bottleneck or not, we can't know because it was never addressed, it's speculation on my part.
One thing they always fall down is the idea that government bureaucracy is so quick and competent that they could do something like installing mass surveillance at a moments notice while the country is in chaos without it leaking due the next 20 years
It didn't have to be installed, it was already, although in a pre-Snowden era, governments doing Internet surveillance was the conspiracy theory. My speculation is that more international traffic got routed through the existing surveillance infrastructure, causing a bottleneck that slowly got better.