Watch out for sharks: The bizarre history of internet outages

Kissaki , 2 hours ago

In 2011, a 75-year-old woman took all 2.9 million Armenians offline when she sliced through that cable with a spade near the Georgian village of Ksani. The woman, who was scavenging for copper at the time, was arrested but reportedly let go soon after because of her advanced age. She later told reporters: “I have no idea what the internet is.”

lol, what a great story

scrubbles , 3 hours ago

Everyone is all shocked but anyone who has worked in actual IT, development, or computers directly know that the whole system is brittle and ready to fall over at a moments notice. It’s popsicle sticks and glue all the way down. It’s more surprising this is the first major outage like this.

We can try to protect our systems from mistakes like this but at the end of the day, all it takes is one intern somewhere on a project who can fuck everything up. And I don’t mean crowdstrike, but we all know that there are more vendors who have even less QA, who cheaper out on labor and safety for profits. The entire thing is one config file away from collapsing

onlinepersona , 5 hours ago

The less diversity you have in any ecosystem, the more vulnerable you become, and there’s zero diversity at the top of the internet supply chain. You can pick any core area of the internet and you’ll find a very short list of companies in control.

That natural conclusion of an absolutely free market is a monopoly. With no regulation, one company will end up dominating everything. I can only hope that over time we will have technologies that allow citizens to make big mesh networks.

CrowdStrike is the closest we’ve come to a full-blown internet shutdown. Even with its unprecedented scale, however, the consequences lasted just a few days.

Indeed. I bet you nothing important will come of this. Crowdstrike will survive, maybe with a scrape or two, but will continue to enjoy unfettered access to critical systems world-wide.

Anti Commercial-AI license