Internet hiccups today? You're not alone. Here's why

If they internet were to not work for the period of one year, what would happen? How many people would die? (A genuine question for anyone who feels up to task)

That would be a good question for Randell Munroe. https://what-if.xkcd.com

Submitted.

s/people/careers

It would probably launch some careers, considering someone would have to figure out what went wrong and get it all back up and running again!

This is one of the disruptions a solar storm will bring to us. We are just lucky we weren't hit directly last time.

http://www.space.com/21237-extreme-solar-storms-electrical-g...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/25/us-electricity-sol...

I don't think we are ready yet to embrace this possibility.

Instead of spending money to prepare for this, they are working on writing new throttling plans.

Possibly related?

http://noc.c4l.co.uk/2014/08/cisco-infrastructure-emergency-...

Following today’s impact to service, engineers have identified that the following emergency maintenance is required:

Location: Cisco core

Start: 2014-08-13 00:01 BST

End: 2014-08-13 04:00 BST

More:

http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2deb04...

http://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/2dcrl2/major_net...

Package loss of 3 to 5% on a couple of Verizon routes:

http://internetpulse.net/Main.aspx?xAxis=Destination&yAxis=O...

Active BGP entries >= 512k:

http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/plota?file=%2Fvar%2Fdata%...

More discussion on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2dc0qe/uk_anyone_e...

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2dcol3/the_interne...

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2dcer9/anyone_else...

A route to one of our subdomains was not working at our hosting provider. It affected our application because we relied upon the subdomain as a cache between S3. Pages in the application would fail when cache was reloaded.

Never mind our application, but there are some interesting "what ifs" out there, like if the route for some major players were to suddenly stop working...or, perhaps similar to our app, some minor routes failed but major sites relied upon them.

This explains the problem I had with LastPass earlier today. None of my computers would let me log in for about a 10 minute period.

Just your friendly old neighbour NSA installing a new backdoor on one of the backbones, apologies for the slight hiccup you might experience, blame it on your isp