Tier One ISPs Dying

xbmodder writes "Two tier one ISPs are down today. At about 23:30PST both Verio and Level 3 starting having problems with routes. According to Level 3 this is a software upgrade gone awry. Is this the end for Level 3?" Many, many reports about this are coming in, and if you're wondering why the stories were rather sparse overnight, it's because it's difficult to post them without internet access. Hope everyone else is back online too.

Could be good

Maybe I'll get some work done today for a change.

-S

Re:Looks good now...

First you fail to create a good link, and then that link goes to a login screen? Your link posting rights have been removed.

Re:Looks good now...

Don't blame him! This was a software upgrade gone awry.

Flicker

Is there a term for this kind of intermittant site inaccessability due to Internet outage -- not the user or the server being offline, but the Internet failing?

Re:Flicker

Actually, I think calling it an Online to Offline Provisioning Suituation in the Internet Environment would be better - "Call the engineers, there's been an OOPSIE!".

Re:Flicker

Kill yourself.

TEOTWAWKI

Is there a term for this kind of intermittant site inaccessability due to Internet outage -- not the user or the server being offline, but the Internet failing?

Yes. Domesday as predicted in the ancient scrolls. In this day and age it is commonly called The End of the World as We Know It.

Re:TEOTWAWKI

The End of the World as We Know It.

Sure, but I feel fine.

*shrug*

Re:TEOTWAWKI

*calls the RIAA for stealing a line from a song*
SICK HIM!!!

Nitpick

Domesday [wikipedia.org] is something like a census of Britain circa 1085. It has nothing to do with internet outages, which is more akin to doomsday [wikipedia.org].

Re:Nitpick - gang of thugs

It doesn't speak much for the Slashdot community when Wikipedia has to put this warning at the top of a Slashdot-linked page:

This article has recently been linked from Slashdot.
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.

flapping

Way back in the day when I was a Network Controller at BBN Planet, if we began to have cascading routing outages we'd call it "Flapping"... Visualize a wounded bird squirming around on the ground flapping...

Takes me back... My first night on the job a rat in Berkeley chewed through the wrong cable and got himself fried -- he also happened to take the entire west-coast off the internet for the better part of a day.

Then there was the time an electrical worker got vaporized in a hole near MIT which caused quite a problem too as it overloaded the MIT power station, but the fallout wasn't nearly as bad as the day of the rat...

Re:flapping

halon defeat

OT, but it brings back memories of working at Purolator Courier in the machine room. IBM mainframe shop.

We had had trouble with the damn fire suppression all day. On third shift, around 3 AM, the trouble alarm went off (again) for the umpteenth time. One of the operators, a nervous fellow who was a little bit green, went over to the annunciator panel and opened it to see what the Trouble Might Be.

A fire technician he was not, and he apparently didn't know the difference between the trouble bell and the klaxon that would sound when a halon dump was about to occur; so he reached around the open panel door and hit the halon defeat.

Or so he thought.

It was actually the Big Red Switch.

The whole room (full of 3420 and 3480 tape drives, the 3745s, the 3800 laser printers; and the floor above, containing trivial bits like the DASD and the CPU all plunged into a deafening silence.

We all stared at each other and at the newbie BOFHeck.

A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was the Indianapolis air hub for Purolator, wondering why (when they were about to receive about 150 planes from all over the country) they didn't have anything useful displayed on their green screens.

That was a fun morning.

Ah, those were the days indeed.

Clarification

I'm sure you know this, but for the rest: "flapping" is the common term for when a router's routing tables rapidly cycle between two invalid states [cisco.com]. The dead bird analogy is pretty descriptive, but the term "flapping" has technical and not allegorical origins.

Outtage Explained

It's nice to see something explaining why I was paged at 2:30am. And now, to whom from Level3 do I send my bill?

Call me silly?

But what is a tier 1 ISP?

Is that like a bandwidth wholesaler or something?

Re:Call me silly?

One that doesn't lease their infrastructure.
Eg. you have your own large backbone, you own all your equipment.

In effect, a small and wholly owned internet that peers with other internets.

Re:Call me silly?

Tier 1 are the huge ISPs, which peer with eachother (and don't pay eachother transit fees) and sell transit services to smaller ISPs (which do pay fees to send traffic through the Tier 1 ISPs). So yeah, bandwidth wholesalers is pretty accurate. See this wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].

Re:Call me silly?

In 1994, The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded contracts to replace the National Science Foundation Net (NSFNet) Internet backbone. These contracts were for backbone transport, routing arbiter and traffic exchange points (NAPs).
          These contracts were awarded for the original 15 NSF sponsored NAPs, and to become a Tier 1 ISP, you had to have atleast DS3 connectivty to all 15 NAPs.
          It's a very old and crappy definition, and I wish people would stop using it, because it is very easy to meet now adays, and most of those original NAPs are now insignificant, compared to the power of the force.

What is this about?

An ISP's server being down 1 day is unacceptable of course, but to say it is dying already? or is there more to these ISP's? (haven't heard of them before)

Re:What is this about?

This is not _just_ their server being down, this is the entire network of two tier 1 carriers [wikipedia.org].

The (basic) implications of this is that a good chunk of the internet as a whole is inaccessible to the rest of the internet.

Re:What is this about?

Yeah, that's it. They're dead. You pinned it right on the nose.
They won't be back tomorrow. All gone.

Reality check: An internet outage, no matter how big, is no different than a power outage. Yeah, here in the US we would be talking about loss of power to both coasts with only the middle left running. But after the outage life goes on.

Re:What is this about?

We're not talking about just a server. We're talking about the entire ISP's networking capability. Tier 1 ISPs own huge swaths of networks-- literally miles and miles of cable, and sometimes radio and other links. They route the traffic across these lines.

When a Tier 1 provider goes down, their customers go down too. That picture on the Boing Boing page shows a list of the Tier 1 providers. Every ISP that is NOT a Tier 1, gets their access from a Tier 1.

People speculate that Level 3 is dying because they've been making some really bad decisions lately, resulting in a lot of outages. A couple of weeks ago, they actively filtered out traffic from their competetor, Cogent, over a dispute from how much to charge at the point their networks exchanged traffic (called a 'peering point'). Now this. The rumor is that the company is in financial trouble.

Re:What is this about?

It's not a rumour that Level 3 is in financial trouble - it's clear for all to see. They have crushing debt repayments right now.

The Cogent spat isn't over yet either - Level 3 are going to de-peer Cogent again on November 9th. They are trying to force Cogent to pay for transit, but right now it looks like Cogent holds the strongest hand and Level 3 will be once again forced to back down.

Re:What is this about?

The reason that Level 3 isn't happy with the peering arrangement currently is that it's not even remotely even. Level 3 sends almost nothing over Cogent's network and Cogent sends over a vast majority of their traffic through Level 3. A peering agreement is based on the premise that the companies will be sending almost equal amounts of traffic through each network. Level 3 has been analyzing that for a time now but the last straw was when Cogent had a sales blitz targeting Level 3 customers saying that they would dramatically drop their prices to almost nothing to get them to switch away from Level 3. They are now also using the downtime that was experienced due to the peering problem in their advantage even though Cogent is in the wrong. Cogent knew about the depeering and did nothing to resolve it.

Re:What is this about?

Oh yes, I'm aware of all of that - but (generally speaking) Cogent has the content, and Level 3 has the users. Guess who catches the most heat from the de-peering from its customers - Level 3 - as their customers will tend to see the problem first.

I predict that Cogent will do the same again as well - not lift a finger to fix the problem when they are de-peered on November 9th, and Level 3 will probably end up being forced to re-peer as customers whine that they are not getting the whole Internet and threaten to take up Cogent's free 1 year offer.

Re:What is this about?

Tier 1 ISPs own huge swaths of networks-- literally miles and miles of cable, and sometimes radio and other links. They route the traffic across these lines.

More precisely, Level3 seem to own 23,000 miles of optic fiber [prnewswire.com]. :-)

The rumor is that the company is in financial trouble.

Yeah, not so much of a rumor anymore either -- Level 3 loss widens [reuters.com].

Showing solid green now.

See http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.aspx ?xAxis=Destination&yAxis=Origin&zAxis=Metric&nAxis =Period/ [keynote.com]

Guess not

Take a look at the scoreboard [keynote.com] now. The mentioned problems are gone and Level 3 is no longer in the red.

Re:Guess not

Uh no. Level3 disconnected from ALL the other Tier1 ISPs. So did Verio. This had nothing to do with last weeks Level3/Cogent spat.

Re:Guess not

It was as though millions of overnight pron downloaders cried out as one and were then silenced.

Re:Guess not

The scary thing is it makes you wonder is some terrorist who has intimate knowledge of how Tier 1 ISP's work doing a trial run in the middle of the night by knocking out Level 3 and Verio backbones so later they could try to knock out ALL the backbones in a co-ordinated terrorist attack. (eek!)

Oh please. You know, it's pretty easy to figure out if it's something likely to be attempted by terrorists or not. The simple test is does it cause mass "terror". As annoying as it might be, lack of internet access is an annoyance. Perhaps a very expensive and exasperating annoyance, but it won't cause mass terror. Terrorists prefer things like bombs, or poison gas, or disease. Some other things people get worked up about but terrorists are unlikely to attempt: sabotaging bridges and tunnels to cause traffic jams; sabotaging electricity distribution to cause blackouts; sabotaging railroad tracks, making commuters late for work!. Think DEATH, not irritation. Quit with the automatic "terrorist hysteria" already, people!

Re:huh??

Don't you get it? They deleted the internet!!

About a quarter of the people i know lost internet

Today i was playing world of warcraft and on our raid about 25% of my guild mates lost their internet on and off. Other than that the lag was higher than normal but i wondered what the hell was going on. Anyway we still pwn some dragons in BWL :)

Noticed it this morning

Noticed this this morning when a customer called upset about his hosting services being unreachable. A quick traceroute showed one of level3's ip to be down. A few minutes later more customers had problems with different routers from level3. As soon as I saw level3 I knew enough, shrugged it off and told the customer that it was routing problem we couldn't fix but those responsible were most likely already trying to fix it.

It seems fixed now though, so no, this isn't the death of the Internet just yet.

This just in...

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Tier One

Re:point of the internet?

Nope. Redundancy and reliability cost money. Fast, cheap, reliable, pick two. Take a look at a typical network and count the single points of failure. Then there are common mode failures, like bugs in router software, that can take down entire networks.

/.'ed

Hey look, we slashdotted Level 3!

I noticed it.

I was up late studying for a German exam, and I was having problems connecting to websites hosted in Germany that I was using to help myself review (dict.leo.org and canoo.net, if you're curious). US websites worked no problem.

Off to the test!

Non event... for now

While this only lasted a few hours, it still caused a mess across the North American Internet during those hours. The point is a small amount of big networks are responsible for over 90% of the traffic on the Internet. If alter.net went down it would be total chaos. If just one of the major peering points went down, sure the traffic would be rerouted, but overloading the other points at such high latency that it would be almost unusuable. You better hope no one destroys MAE-EAST or we'll have a live example of what ife without the Internet is like.

Re:Non event... for now

You better hope no one destroys MAE-EAST or we'll have a live example of what ife without the Internet is like.

Yeah, I remember life before the internet. I used to read books, watch TV, and even occasionally go outside under that big yellow face.

*shiver*

Link in the article

I notice the article links back to Slashdot... I wonder is Slashdot is going to get BoingBoing'ed?

What kind of Timeframe

Is this even an issue? I mean, this was probably scheduled maitenance that went a little longer than expected. I have been through this before. It just sounds like Level 3 dropped some core routers for a few minutes to do a code upgrade - it didn't work so hot, so they were down for a few more mintes, OSPF/BGP decided to tell all the clients that they have no routes, Level 3 gets the routers back up, OSPF/BGP tells everyone that their fine again. Was this like 6 hours, or 45 min?

Re:What kind of Timeframe

It was maybe 2 hours or so before new routing tables started spreading to bypass Level3's and Verio's networks, and afterwards it started stabilizing again, then it seems Level3 has since then woke up again. The XO network also had routing troubles from this btw, maybe more too. Sites and services such as AOL, SpeakEasy (when asked, they were stumped and could only say it affected all their customers, hehe), Google, and Wikipedia had access problems depending on where you lived during this timeframe.

So much for the internet surviving a nuclear war!

Now it can't even survive a software upgrade on some of the routers!

Is the Internet Down?

Why couldn't this have happened during my business day? For just once when a user calls and asks "is the internet down?" I'd like to be able to say "actually, yes, it is."

Overlay Routing

This sort of event provides motivation for overlay routing schemes, which can compensate for major outages along various routes of the backbone:

http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi04/tech/full_pape rs/subramanianOver/subramanianOver.pdf [usenix.org]
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/pubs/2005-hwj-in focom.pdf [umich.edu]

Time in UTC

23:30 PST = 07:30 UTC = 09:30 CEST

But perhaps what's really meant is:

23:30 PDT = 06:30 UTC = 08:30 CEST ?

Over 100 comments so far....

...and not one Netcraft joke?

The main problem areas...

happened in Detroit in the last 24 hours. Apparently all ingoing/outgoing traffic to other Tier One ISPs had problems in that city. Also, Philadelphia had really slow traffic within Level3 (and slower to all the others), and had major problems connecting to Verio. San Diego also had some problems, especially within the Level3 network. St. Louis was the only area without major problems...

For a breakdown, check out this view of the data [keynote.com].

Microsoft?

Is there any way we can blame Microsoft for this?
Were they upgrading to one of the Beta builds of Windows Vista Home Edition?

You insensitive clod!

I'm not back online

Level 3?

Haven't they been hanging on by their fingernails since the dot-com bust? I've know a few guys who got burned working for them just before the bust, and I've seen several recruiters post stuff like "A local communications company (NOT Level 3!)" in their job reqs.

I don't know that they've replaced Sprint yet on my list of most sucktastic internet companies. Time was you lost connectivity to an important piece of the Internet (Like your favorite Quake TeamFortress server) and a traceroute would show the failure somewhere in the Sprint backbone. So far they've been more reliable than Sprint at their worst, at least for me.

If they go under, well Tier 1's don't ever really die. Chances are one of the other Tier 1's will buy their assets and it'll be business as usual. Usually the buyer is MCI.

Of course the true test is pretty easy -- has anyone who works at Level 3 had their paycheck bounce yet? Surely there are a few readers among their employees...

FFS, what a fucking dreadful summary

Is this the end for Level 3?

No, of course not, you blithering imbecile. L3 had a 2 hour global routing meltdown. Now, it's fixed. Whilst their routes were flapping, other carriers saw transient increases in latency and some problems with reachability, to some sites. However, everything continued to work properly for non-L3 customers. Two hours later L3's routes are back and working properly. End of story, nothing to see here, move along please.

Slashdot editors, do you really expect us to believe that no-one had submitted a more coherent or accurate story than this one? Come on, for heaven's sake.

Anyway, a network engineer's view can be seen in the overnight traffic on NANOG: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2005-10/ [merit.edu] "Tier One ISPs dying" indeed. Worst. Story. EVER.

X is Dying

Glad to see that Tier 1 ISPs are joing the ranks of BSD and Apple.

Has to be said...

Oh, so THAT's why my daily spam load suddenly dropped by about 35% or so...

Unixshell graphs caught my eye

I don't work there, or own any shares in unixshell.

I was looking for a Linux Virtual Host, blah, blah.

Stumbed apon these pretty pictures [unixshell.com] (near bottom of page) .

Curious, I thought, what happened to Level(3) ? I though for a second because perhaps unixshell had a peering with those people that Level(3) were in dispute with.

Nope, just one of those regular outages that make the 99.999% promises sound a little over done.

Re:Isn't God trying to tell us something?

People have been able to say something like that at every point in history. And I'd hardly call this nastier than hurricanes, and the Tsunami was worse than either them or this. The sky is not falling.

Re:Yep My ISP went wrong

No you idiot, it's because we block you on sight.