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Comment by nanankcornering | Hacker News Reader

affecting other T1 providers too, NTT, Arelion (ex-Telia) also cloud providers OVH who have dark fibers between EU <-> Asia

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outage caused by AAE-1 submarine cable cut in Egypt.. well.. let's see how long it takes

https://twitter.com/CloudflareRadar/status/15342010304303636...

actually logged in to make a joke about how the everyday vpc hiccups we live with are becoming indistinguishable from reported downage but of course hn has more current info than the gcp team i was chatting with and if this trend of cutting undersea cables continues i'm getting a shortwave ;)

It's a fun hobby even without cut fibers. :)

The Internet really is a series of tubes after all.

But it's now a bit stuck.

The tubes are full.

And SEA-ME-WE-5 too apparently.

I had a Wiocc outage on London-Kenya last night, didn't think much about it, maybe they rerouted from break last night, and that's why I had such big problems today

If they both went together than that feels like an anchor, if one went last night and another today that's a nasty coincidence. I'm not sure which is worse.

>From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a capacity shortage following two simultaneous fiber-cuts.

That is... unusual... correct? O_o

Especially if one was an undersea cable if not possibly both? O_O

(I'd ask on Twitter, but the handle for this nym was removed after I started to monitor how many people viewed my jokes -- some would get only a hundred views, some many many thousands, and it broke my heart it seemed to matter more if I angered the wrong people than if I sincerely tried to share my thoughts that my account was nuked, especially since the most useful data was not available via the takeout tool)

Well they are clearly not dark fibers as the cut is causing issues?

Indeed. Not sure why that term is misused so much. There's nothing dark about fiber that's being used.

> A dark fibre or unlit fibre is an unused optical fibre, available for use in fibre-optic communication

More or less, someone with a cable leases you dark fiber, and then you light it. What are you using? lit fiber (obviously), what did you lease? dark fiber.

When it's severed, it's not exactly lit anymore either ;)

By that logic, all fiber is "dark fiber". :)

As I recall, "dark fiber" came into use after the dotcom bust left lots of overbuilt and unused network infrastructure around that companies could buy up for years after for pennies on the dollar. Buying "dark fiber" in that context had meaning - it meant you were buying already built-out and unused fiber, compared to running your own fiber lines at full cost as had previously been more common.

Well, I was joking a bit, but I would consider it dark fiber when you lease the fiber and run the equipment on both ends, and lit fiber when the owner of the fiber is running the equipment on both ends and selling you IP transit.

> When it's severed, it's not exactly lit anymore either ;)

It literally is lit though, the lasers at both ends are still trying to send bits, or at least sending pulses to do fault location.

oh, so dark matter is like unused matter. Got it.

My favorite smart ass response when someone asks me what dark fiber is: Evil Fiber

But seriously, it is just a term of art, when one carrier sub-leases fiber without any terminating equipment and they provide their own equipment to light the fiber. It is "dark" from the standpoint of the provider, they are not "lighting" it. The customer is. Typically the fiber is leased using something called an IRU indefeasible right to use. Basically "condo-ised" fiber.

Ooooooh. I thought "dark" was some weird domain-specific nomenclature to describe "not available on the open market", with the open market being like a transport network of (lit up) lines, and dark = not lit up = not on the open market.

Now I actually understand the definition I'd say "unlit fiber" feels like a better-resolved way of putting it, although I could see the uninitiated imagining that describing a service that needed an additional subscription on top or something, which isn't quite the right nuance.

At least "dark fiber" isn't a complete lie, like some other tech terms are (Looking at you "serverless")

Don't forget the "dark" web, wharever that means anymore. These terms are great for marketing groups to paint an image but often very quickly lose any technical relationships they once had.

Serverless is from the notion that you are not concerned with the server. I.e., that your product/ infrastructure inventory is... Serverless.

Source for OVH: https://network.status-ovhcloud.com/incidents/pphdyqq9cgyl Couldn't find for Arelion

This link has been updated to say the root cause is a fiber cut.

Maybe a shared undersea cable or landing point issue since it’s multiple

>affecting other T1 providers too

Then maybe the headline should be more accurate rather than give free marketing to what some might term a monopoly.

This was reported before it was clear that cables were cut. As with many things symptoms appeared before the cause was understood and that knowledge filter through the NOCs of the world, let alone out to users.

Also, how is the headline not accurate? Did Google Cloud not in fact have major packet loss between multiple regions? How does "this service is down" count as marketing, isn't it giving people bad impressions?

>This was reported before it was clear that cables were cut.

That's rude. Who did that?

What is this snarky attitude? Be civil.

As the parent comment mentions, the service providers are obviously going to see an issue the second it happens, but it might take minutes/hours for information to disseminate on the root cause.

Just like... Practically any incident. If you immediately know the root cause, it shouldn't have been an incident in the first place.

I think there's a /s on the comment you're responding to :)

>What is this snarky attitude? Be civil.

How am I beint uncivil? If I reply in short sentences I'm uncivil, longer ones have my words twisted and picked apart.

"That's rude. Who cut the cable?" is a legitimate question and perfectly civil.

If you are perceiving something as "snarky", that is on you. You cannot see into my mind.

(If I didn't care, I'd just smirk to myself and not even ask who cut the cable.)

Now, do you think the above is uncivil? If so why?

And, as I asked previously, do you know who cut the cable?

You actually asked "That's rude. Who did that?" after commenting "Then maybe the headline should be more accurate rather than give free marketing to what some might term a monopoly."

The other interpretation of that statement, given your antagonistic first comment, is asking "Who issued the incident", as evidenced by the second half of my reply.

With 2 cables at the same time it could well be a ship dragging an anchor

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