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Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

Too funny -- I diagnosed this to L3 on my home net this morning and I found myself saying "I wonder if anyone else has this issue?". When it comes to the backbone providers there is no Twitter account or status.level3.net or status.theinternet. Hard to do when everything is decentralized. I usually go hit NANOG when stuff like this happens but you're not guaranteed to find something real time there.

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http://www.internetpulse.com/

Yea, same here. I took this traceroute (mtr): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5k29jnfkhz0ggu/2013-10-...

Not sure what was going on there, I wish I did, but seems to be related?

Edit: that was going to an nyc digital ocean VPS

Out of curiosity, what do you do to diagnose something like this? What tools and commands?

http://www.internetpulse.net/ and http://traceroute.org/ are two sites I used in addition to the usual unix tools like traceroute.

trace route is nice BUT mtr is better. Mtr does averages on latency at every node and any lost packets.

many providers also host "Looking glasess". Its a server hanging off their core network that allows you to run pings and traceroutes

http://lookingglass.level3.net/ (seems to be down currently)

a nice big list of looking glasses

http://www.lookinglass.org/

> Hard to do when everything is decentralized.

It's funny, because when you think about it, the Internet is remarkably centralized despite its potential to be almost completely decentralized.

A coworker of mine was telling me just this week that the building we work in, in New York City, is one of two single points of failure for the Northeast (and both points of failure are in New York).

This is an incredibly chilling thought when you consider just how little control humans still have over natural disasters (we saw this firsthand last year in NYC).

By "single point of failure" I don't mean that every single person would be unable to access every single website, but that large chunks of the Internet (particularly anything coming from Europe) would be unavailable for most of those users.

wouldn't that traffic eventually get routed via asia?

Or Florida.

Well, you either work in 60 Hudson, or ... :)

The one that doesn't have 80,000 gallons of fuel and 2000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue

Hi Googler!

Apparently it's under construction: http://status.theinternet.net/

Well, there is lg.level3.net but it's down too!

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