In what has conk something of a yearly tradition, it’s at 1 time fourth dimension for us to introduce 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past times year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been really interesting.
Just similar previous years, nosotros direct maintain included problems ranging from website outages in addition to service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, y'all are jump to recognize several of them.
Let’s larn started! The major incidents on the Internet inwards 2010 were…
Wikipedia’s failover fail
Wikipedia has conk hence ubiquitous that it can’t conk downward for a infinitesimal without people noticing. According to a network issue caused the biggest outage the service had seen inwards 4 years. The outage became extra noticeable non only because of the sheer number of blogs it hosts (at the fourth dimension 10 million, at 1 time many more), but also because hence many high-profile blogs operate it. The WordPress.com outage took downward blogs such every bit TechCrunch, GigaOM in addition to the Wired blogs for almost ii hours inwards February.
Gmail’s multiple outages
Gmail is 1 of the world’s most pop electronic mail services, in addition to is an integral business office of Google Apps. Unfortunately, it’s had several notable outages this year. These issues haven’t e'er affected Gmail’s entire user base, but plenty of it to brand headlines inwards the news.
In February, a routine maintenance caused a disruption that cascaded from information centre to information center, knocking out Gmail worldwide for almost 2.5 hours. In March, Gmail had an number that lasted every bit much as 36 hours for some users. Another incident happened early on inwards September, whenoverloaded routers made the service completely unavailable for almost ii hours.
China reroutes the Internet
In April, Cathay Telecom spread wrong traffic routes to the residue of the Internet. In this specific instance it meant that during eighteen minutes, potentially every bit much every bit 15% of the traffic on the Internet was sent via Cathay because routers believed it was the most effective road to take.
Similar incidents direct maintain happened before, for illustration when YouTube was hijacked globally past times a pocket-size Pakistani Internet service provider ii years ago. Normally this results inwards a crash since the Internet service provider can’t grip the traffic. However, Cathay Telecom was able to grip the traffic, hence most people never noticed this. At most they noticed increased latency every bit traffic to the affected networks took a really long in addition to awkward road across the Internet (via China).
Even though no serious outage happened every bit a termination of this, nosotros retrieve it’s such a fascinating disruption of the traffic stream that nosotros felt it was worth including here. This is an inherent weakness of today’s Internet infrastructure, which largely relies on the abide by system. Renesys has a more in-depth explanation of this incident in addition to how it could happen. We should solid lay down that it wasn’t necessarily an intentional hijacking.
Twitter’s World Cup woes
Twitter seemed similar the ideal companion to the World Cup (soccer to y'all Americans, football game to the residue of the world, John Cleese explains it best). Tweeting almost the World Cup proved hence pop that it slowed downward or broke Twitter several times during the weeks of the event. The upside is that this effectively charge tested Twitter’s infrastructure, revealing potential weaknesses. As a result, Twitter’s service today is most probable to a greater extent than stable than it mightiness otherwise direct maintain been.
Facebook’s feedback loop
Facebook has conk a truthful juggernaut amongst to a greater extent than than 500 meg users. That hasn’t changed its evolution philosophy, “don’t live afraid to interruption things.” This aggressive approach to speedy evolution has been fundamental to Facebook’s success, but, well, sometimes it will break things.
Facebook’s worst outage inwards 4 years came inwards September when a seemingly innocent update to Facebook’s backend code caused a feedback loop that completely overloaded its databases. The solely means for Facebook to recover was to accept downward the entire site in addition to take away the bad code earlier taking the site dorsum online. Facebook was offline for about 2.5 hours.
Foursquare’s double whammy
Foursquare’s location-based social network has been a resounding success in addition to has inwards footling fourth dimension gathered a next of millions, hence when the service went down for roughly xi hours early inwards October, people of course of education noticed. The culprit was an overloaded database. And every bit if to add together insult to injury, almost just the same thing happened the twenty-four hr stream after, taking the site downward for an additional half-dozen hours.
Paypal’s payment problems
When Paypal stumbles, hence produce the many thousands of merchants that rely on Paypal to grip payments, non to refer the millions of regular consumers who operate Paypal for their online payments. You tin imagine the effect, in addition to sales lost, if Paypal stops working for hours on end. Which was exactly what happened in Oct when a work amongst Paypal’s network equipmentcrippled the service for every bit much every bit 4.5 hours. At its peak the number affected all of Paypal’s members worldwide for 1.5 hours.
Tumblr’s tumble
Tumblr was (and all the same is) 1 of the dandy social media successes of 2010, but amongst rapid growth comes scalability challenges. This has become increasingly noticeable, in addition to culminated with a 24-hour outage early on inwards December when all of Tumblr’s xi meg blogs were offline due to a broken database cluster.
The Wikileaks drama
If you’ve missed this y'all must direct maintain been hiding nether a rock, which inwards plow was buried below a mount of rocks. The site issues that Wikileaks experienced during the so-called Cablegate were significant. First the site was the victim of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service railroad train on which forced Wikileaks to switch to a unlike spider web host. After Wikileaks moved to Amazon EC2 to improve grip the increased traffic, Amazon presently near them down. In add-on to this, several countries blocked access to the Wikileaks site. And in addition to hence the mayhap largest blow came when the DNS provider for the official Wikileaks.org domain, EveryDNS, near downward the domain itself.
Without a working domain hollo inwards place, Wikileaks could for a fourth dimension solely live reached past times its IP address. Since then, Wikileaks has spread itself out, mirroring the content over hundreds of sites in addition to unlike domain names, including a novel principal site at Wikileaks.ch.
As if this wasn’t plenty drama, y'all direct maintain to add together the reactions from some of Wikileaks’ supporters (not from Wikileaks itself). The services that cutting off Wikileaks inwards diverse ways (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, EveryDNS, etc.) were subjected to distributed denial-of-service attacks from upset supporters across the world, which resulted inwards fifty-fifty to a greater extent than downtime. There was also collateral damage, when some attackers mistook the DNS provider EasyDNS for EveryDNS, aiming their attacks at the wrong target.
The Wikileaks drama is without a incertitude the Internet incident of the year.
Final words
The events nosotros direct maintain listed hither inwards a higher house actually are only a pocket-size sample of everything that has happened inwards 2010. Even without Wikileaks, it’s been a really eventful twelvemonth on the Internet. That said, this is something nosotros discovery ourselves maxim every year. The truth is that the Internet is non quite every bit stable in addition to enterprise every bit most of us would similar to believe. It’s a complex system, similar a living organism, in addition to things produce interruption from fourth dimension to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale plenty that nobody notices, in addition to sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.
Hopefully 2011 volition live a less eventful year, but nosotros wouldn’t count on it.
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