Kentik Blog: Internet Outages

In the latest collision between geopolitics and the physical internet, three major submarine cables in the Red Sea were cut last month likely as a result of attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen on passing merchant vessels. In this post, we review the situation and delve into some of the observable impacts of the subsea cable cuts.

In this post, Doug Madory reviews the highlights of his wide-ranging internet analysis from the past year, which included covering the state of BGP (both routing leaks and progress in RPKI), submarine cables (both cuts and another historic activation), major outages, and how geopolitics has shaped the internet in 2023.

Last week a major internet outage took out one of Australia’s biggest telecoms. In a statement out yesterday, Optus blames the hours-long outage, which left millions of Aussies without telephone and internet, on a route leak from a sibling company. In this post, we discuss the outage and how it compares to the historic outage suffered by Canadian telecom Rogers in July 2022.

In the early hours of Wednesday, January 25, Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud, suffered a major outage that disrupted their cloud-based services and popular applications such as Sharepoint, Teams, and Office 365. In this post, we’ll highlight some of what we saw using Kentik’s unique capabilities, including some surprising aftereffects of the outage that continue to this day.

This past year was another busy one for the internet. This year-end blog post highlights some of the top pieces of analysis that we published in the past 12 months. This analysis employs Kentik’s data, technology, and expertise to inform the industry and the public about issues involving the technical underpinnings of the global internet and how global events can impact connectivity.

The populations in Cuba and Iran were only the latest to experience what has become an increasingly common tactic of digital authoritarianism: the internet curfew. This tactic, in which internet service is temporarily disabled on a recurring basis, lowers the costs and thus increases the likelihood of government-directed internet disruptions.

On July 8, 2022, Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications suffered a catastrophic outage taking down nearly all services for its 11 million customers in the largest internet outage in Canadian history. We dig into the outage and debunk the notion that it was caused by the withdrawal of BGP routes.

On Tuesday, June 7, internet users in numerous countries from East Africa to the Middle East to South Asia experienced an hours-long degradation in service due to an outage at one of the internet’s most critical chokepoints: Egypt. In this blog post, we review some of the impacts as well as compare how this disruption affected connectivity within the three major public cloud providers.

Every year the internet suffers numerous disruptions and outages, and 2021 was no exception. Kentik’s Doug Madory recaps the top 10. And now the world’s network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021.