This morning, from about 2024-08-05t04:50Z (10:50am local time) to t07:40Z, Bangladesh had another very large Internet outage. Fortunately, unlike the outage that began on 2024-07-18, this one cleared up after about three hours. I presume this outage corresponds to the resignation of the prime minster.
We hope for calm for the people of Bangladesh.
Since around 2024-07-18t15:00Z (July 18,21:00 local time), Bangladesh has had a major,country-wide Internet outage. As of t17:30Z some regions see 97% unreachability. This country-wide outage seems to be in response to civil unrest and protests.
Here’s the view from Trinocular outage detection as of 17:30Z:
We wish the best for the people of Bangladesh during this unrest.
Update July 19 morning: A day after Bangladesh’s Internet connectivity first went down, it remains nearly completely stopped. Here is our view of Bangladeshi connectivity at 2024-07-19t14:40Z (20:40 local time there):
Update July 19 afternoon: USC/ISI posted an article about the Bangladeshi Internet outage and our work as ISI news, and an new NYT article about the protests.
The AP reports “A statement from the country’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said they were unable to ensure service after their data center was attacked Thursday by demonstrators, who set fire to some equipment. The Associated Press was not able to independently verify this.” However, the near-complete outage observed by Trinocular (as seen in the figures above) seems inconsistent with problems at a single datacenter.
Update July 19, 22:28Z: ISOC Pulse has a post about this outage, and reports that “In a press event on 18 July, Bangladesh minister for posts, telecommunications, and information technology, Zunaid Ahmed Palak confirmed that the government had ordered the shutdown. “
Update July 20: The country-wide outage continues.
Update July 21, 17:00Z: Although recent news reports suggest some government response to protests, the near-complete country-wide Internet outage continues.
Update July 22, 23:00Z: Another day with no externally visible change–all of Bangladesh remains inaccessible from outside.
Update July 23, 18:00Z: Beginning around 13:00Z (which 19:00 in Bangladesh), we see the first signs of Bangaldeshi networks coming back on-line! The figure below is as of 16:26Z and shows about half of the national networks reachable from outside the country.
To add about the root cause, the Deccan Herald published an article from Reuters quoting Zunaid Ahmed Palak, junior information technology minister, as saying to reporters: “Mobile internet has been temporarily suspended due to various rumors and the unstable situation created…. on social media” on July 18. Today, Reuters quoted Palak as saying that “broadband internet would be restored by Tuesday night but [he] did not comment on mobile internet”. This statement is consistent with the country-wide outage we observed, and the prior statement suggests the outage was a request of the government.
Update July 24, 13:00Z (19:00 in Bangladesh): It looks like nearly all Bangladeshi networks are now back online.
Update July 25: The July 25 episode of The Briefing, an Australian news podcast, discussed the Bangladeshi outage and its impact, interviewing us about what we saw.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas around 2024-07-08 at 3:17am local time (CDT) (8:17 UTC). We see a fair number of Internet outages in the Huston area, presumably as people lost power due to flooding.
Compared to our view of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 in our blog and web, Beryl looks much less severe–we see fewer areas where most Internet acccess is out (as shown by red circles).
Our most recent data, about 10 hours after landfall (1:33pm local time, or 2024-07-08t18:33Z):
Just before landfall, at 3:17am local time (2024-07-08t08:17Z):
We wish the best for Texas, and for the residents of the Caribbean who experienced Beryl last week.
For current status, please see our near-real-time outage site. Data about this outage will be released at the end of the quarter.
Starting on April 21, 2024, we observed a large Internet outage in the country Georgia. More than half the IP blocks in large parts of the country have become unreachable from the U.S., with the problem persisting for several days so far.
The timing of this outage is consistent with a recent resurgence of protests over the Georgian “Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence”.
On March 14, 2024, we observed a large outage in several West African countries. In Ivory Coast and Liberia, the outage was quite severe, affecting 93% of the active network blocks:
Fortunately some locations were able to partially recover from the problems, presumably by routing through different paths:
The root cause for these outages is likely a problems in multiple undersea telecommunication cables, as has been reported in the Washington Post and the Guardian, among other places.
News reports (for example, at the Verge and Slashdot) mention a large outage in Rogers, a major Canadian telecommunications provider.
We see lots of evidence for this in our Internet outage detection system.
It’s big! Maybe 30% of Toronto and southern Ontario networks, plus a lot of outages in New Brunswick.
Ontario:
New Brunswick:
An update: Newfoundland also sees a lot of outages. Quebec looks in pretty good shape, though.
And it’s lasting a long time. It looks like it started at 5am Eastern time (2022-07-08t09:00Z), it it has lasted 9.5 hours so far!
We wish Rogers personnel and our Canadian neighbors the best.
Update at 2022-07-09t06:15Z (2:15am Eastern time): Toronto is doing much better, with “only” 10% of blocks unreachable (22808 of 21.5k in the 43.8N,79.3W 0.5 grid cell). New Brunswick and Newfoundland still look the same, with outages in about 50% of blocks.
Update at 2022-07-09t21:10Z (5:10pm Eastern time): It looks like many Rogers networks recovered at 2022-07-09t05:15Z (1:15am Eastern time). This includes all of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and most of Ontario. Trinocular has about a one-hour delay while it computes results, so I did not see this result when I checked in the prior update–I needed to wait 15 minutes more.
We recently added timeline support to our Outage World map–clicking on an outage bubble pops up a window with a sparkline (a small graph) showing maximum outages on each data for the current quarter, and clicking on the “daily timeline” tab shows outages for the current 24 hours. These graphs help provide context for how long an outage lasts, and if there were other outages the same quarter.
As an example, here is a major outage effecting most of central and southern Mexico on 2022-01-05. The timeline of Mexico City shows how unusual this outage was:
Some other big outages in 2022 include this big outage in Italy on April 27 from 18:00 to 23:59:
and in southwest Florida on April 24 at 3:15pm Eastern Time (that’s 2022-04-24t19:15Z) that was confirmed as a fiber cut:
Thanks to Erica Stutz for adding timelines to the outage code (as a follow on to her work on Covid-19 Work-from-Home visualization) and to Yuri Pradkin for spotting these events.