this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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Maybe, I would expect redundancy. But ultimately I have no clue. I just remember the last time AWS went down. It seemed that a majority of the sites that I used daily were down all in one go.
Sometimes redundancy doesn't help when it comes to network traffic routing. That system is based heavily on trust and an incorrect route being published can cause recursive loops and such that get propagated very quickly to everyone.
There was a case like this a few years back where a bad route got published by a small ISP, claiming they could handle traffic to a certain set of destinations, but then immediately trying to send that traffic back out again (because they couldn't actually route to that destination), which bounced right back to them because of the bad route. It was propagated based on implicit trust and took down huge chunks of the Internet for a while
So could this be done maliciously? I'm just wondering about the Super Tuesday timing.
Yes, BGP Route Hijacking can be done maliciously although things like BGPSec can make it harder to pull off.
It affected the full 8 billion people in the world, not just the few hundred million on the US.
So? What does that matter, as long as it impacts the ability of poll watchers and legal support to communicate about illegal manipulation?
The point is, not everything is about the US.
This is an example of how you can make factually true statements that are contextually irrelevant.
When a major outage occurs on the day in US politics when 15 states all vote for their party nominees, it's not unreasonable to question whether there was malicious intent.
You're like a "not all men" or "all lives matter" person barging into a conversation, hijacking a perfectly reasonable discussion to push your agenda. Just stop.
In contests that are all foregone conclusions. And it's a social media outage, not an outage affecting voting machines or something. It's ridiculous that you would think that would have something to do with American primaries.
Did you even look up what other things might be happening around the world today before deciding that this had to be about the US?
oh I see, you just suck at reading comprehension
Please go reread the post you replied to. Nobody, myself included, "decided it had to be about the US". They asked a question. They wanted to know if it could be malicious, and the thing that made them think about it was the fact it's Super Tuesday.
The only thing I've ever been arguing is that it is reasonable to think about whether BGP could be abused for malicious intent when you realize it's Super Tuesday. That's it. It's a reasonable connection to make that would precipitate the question. They didn't even ask "is this because it's Super Tuesday?"
But go off, chief. Can't pass up a perfectly good opportunity to let your angst out
Hmm, something happened globally -- must be about the US!
There are 8 billion people in the world and only 300m people in the US but...
Yep, it's definitely about the US.
You dont think who becomes POTUS will effect your country? You've blasted right past being a curmudgeon who doesn't like the US and moved into the territory of troll.
IMO, it is a stretch to claim primary elections as the motive for this outage, but pretending you are entirely aloof and unaffected by US presidential elections is absurd. We get it, you hate the US.
Nobody said anything about US politics not affecting other countries. Of course the dysfunction in the US affects everybody. But, it goes both ways. You don't think events in Europe, India or China affect the US? You're ignoring South America and Africa entirely?
Look at how a small group of rebels in Yemen is having a massive impact on shipping worldwide.
This US-centric view that this worldwide outage is automatically due to US politics is just ridiculous, and you should be embarrassed.
I should be embarrassed that another commenter thinks its related to the elections? Why? It wasn't my idea and my only mention of it was to say I think it unlikely. Go be churlish somewhere else. I'll longer see your replies.
I started ignoring them when they willfully disregarded my explanation in order to reiterate the same misunderstanding they'd already made, simply pointing at text and saying, effectively, "it means what I say it means". They have their view and nothing you or I can say will ever change it. Best to just ignore that type
You're talking about Border Gateway Protocol, BGP, route hijacking and it's occasionally been a real headache over the years. Advertising routes used to be a more manual process so typos and incorrect entries, like what you're talking about, we're reasonably common. It was, and still can be, done maliciously too.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/How-does-BGP-hijacking-work-and-what-are-the-risks
Yup! BGP is an absolute mess and it is kind of a disgrace that it's still the lynchpin of the internet
Yeah, they definitely host an unhealthy amount of the internet.