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Comment by jgehrcke | Hacker News Reader

Might be related to this event?

> The cut lines include Asia-Africa-Europe 1, the Europe India Gateway, Seacom and TGN-Gulf, Hong Kong-based HGC Global Communications said. It described the cuts as affecting 25% of the traffic flowing through the Red Sea.

https://apnews.com/article/red-sea-undersea-cables-yemen-hou...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68478828.amp

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I'm pretty sure that report is just mainstream media reporting this week old cut https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/at-least-one-subs...

Pretty neat if a week after a cable is cut, FB falls over.

Especially when most of the source of truth databases are in the US and Europe, and that sort of data flow doesn't cross the Red Sea. FB has datacenters and points of presence all over, but outside the US/EU it's almost all caching.

Thanks for the reference. Yeah, may also be entirely unrelated.

> Pretty neat if a week after a cable is cut, FB falls over.

that'd be one helluva cache!!

> BY JON GAMBRELL Updated 8:25 PM PST, March 4, 2024

Timelines don't match nicely

I'm 95% sure it'll turn out to be a mundane config error somewhere

It will be DNS related.

Handy troubleshooting tool for outages: https://isitdns.com/

reminds me of http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/ even if not directly related to topic at hand

The sysadmin's haiku:

It's not DNS

There's no way it's DNS

It was DNS

It's not unreachable. I can easily see the FB page on my browser. It's just that even after resetting my password it doesn't accept it. Probably something's fucked up in the credentials database.

Those lines were cut yesterday, so it seems like a poor candidate for explaining the current outages. Likewise the geography doesn't match up with the outages.

This shouldn't affect europe. It just stopped working

Somebody might have fat-fingered a BGP configuration while trying to improve traffic routing that was impacted by the cut cables.

Yea I thought too that core of this is not at the services itself but at thr network somewhere.

maybe a long tail consequence of further shifting traffic?

I was thinking is deploy of DMA "compliant" unbundling the day before it takes force.

Could be both.

time to move away from undersea cables to satellites.

LEO satellites would be too inconsistent, and further orbits have way too much latency.

We have satellites. We use cables b/c they lack the speed and bandwidth necessary to support the total requirements of the modern internet. Satellite-only is only feasible if you're fine with going back to waiting minutes for your saucy jpegs to load (elder millennials, you know what I'm talkin' about).

ever heard of Musk's Starlink? From thier website "Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps" - https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70

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