Hurricane Helene made landfall in the U.S. at 11:10pm EDT Sept. 26 (2024-09-27t03:10Z) near Tallahassee, Florida, and we’ve been watching it in the Trinocular Internet Outage system.
Flordia Internet infrasructure appears to have done quite well, with relatively few Internet outages. Here is the view 4.5 hours after landfall, at 3:40am EDT Sept. 27 (2024-09-27t07:40Z), when the eye was already over southern Georgia:
However, storm damange resulted in many outages across Georgia at daybreak. Here is 11 hours after landfall, at 6am EDT Sept 27 (2024-09-27t10:00):
Fortunately the Internet infrastructure in Georgia was quick to recover, suggesting most Internet outages were power loss. We wish the best for those in Kentucky, and for those with physical storm damage and coping with flooding.
There was a huge Internet outage on June 19, 2024. It affected millions of people, interfering with their ability to travel, interact with friends and family, and with businesses to communicate with their customers and place orders. It cost the global economy millions of dollars.
And it had nothing to do with CrowdStrike.
I’m talking about the the 5-day near-total shutdown of the Internet in Bangladesh, from 2024-07-18t15:00Z (9pm July 18 local time in Bangladesh) until about 2024-07-23t13:00Z (7pm July 23 local time). For most of that period, pretty much all Bangladeshi networks were down. People could not communicate with each other. Here are the start, middle, recovery pictures from our blog entry:
These figures show Bangladesh, with circles whose size indicates the number of networks that are out in each part of the country. Circle color indicates the percentage of networks that are out–red is near 100% networks unreachable. My research group measures Internet outages, and you can look at what happened in our website. Red basically never happens for big countries, at least since the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Bangladesh had civil unrest, protests, and riots due to an unpopular employment law (as reported by many organizations, including the New York Times). The government chose to shut down their Internet (as reported by AP, and others). They restored services on July 24, but I am told they are still blocking several social media services.
What does this have to do with CloudStrike?
Well, nothing. But you may have heard that CloudStrike had a software-update that went wrong, also on July 19. It also interfered with millions of people’s ability to travel, interact with friends and family, and with businesses to communicate with their customers and place orders, as it crashed millions of computers running Microsoft Windows and left them difficult to recover.
But the CloudStrike software glitch was not an Internet outage.
Yes, millions of computers failed. But the Internet was never affected by the failure of CloudStrike computers. Anyone could use the Internet just fine last week, provided they were using services that did not depend on Microsoft Windows. And lots of the computers that failed (like flight status kiosks in airports) were not on the public Internet.
CloudStrike was a massive software failure, but not an Internet outage.
I mention this because I heard multiple media sources discuss the CloudStrike-caused Internet outage. Most prominent was this article by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier on Lawfare (and then reposted on Schneier’s blog), that starts “Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks.” They point to “brittleness of infrastructure” as a risk. The article is true, except for the word “Internet”. The New York times called it a “tech outage“, and us in the field should be as careful about our terms.
By analogy, when two Boeing 373 MAX airliners crashed in 2019 and 2020, we did not call out the “massive air traffic control crash”, we correctly pointed at aircraft failures, and eventually at software and design problems in that specific aircraft.
We should not call all computer failures an Internet outage, when the problem is not about network communication. To improve our computing world, we must identify problems correctly.
Because when a nation of 170 million people goes offline, that’s a big deal, too. And that’s not fixable by rebooting.
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. “
To add about the root cause, the Deccan Heraldpublished 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.
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.
