The internet still works, only the websites are returning the wrong response

yeah, the internet is working perfectly. if you want to view 503 errors.

Believe it or not but "the internet" and "the world wide web" are not synonyms.

True. But the vast majority of use goes via "WWW".

For example email - the other big "internet-user" is technically not part of the WWW, but most (? I don't have any stats, just a guess) of our mailclients run on the WWW, nonetheless.

I think that's the point the other person was making: The Internet is still fine, regardless of whether or not the content gets delivered.

There are roads (or shall I say tubes?). There are cars and busses on the road. Over time, almost everyone has migrated to just a few bus companies. One of them suffers a complete collapse for a few hours. Yes, this means chaos when it comes to transporting people. But the roads are just fine.

This doesn't mean that the situation is fine and that people aren't affected. But it would be entirely different if the roads had been washed away or something.

BitTorrent was half of all Internet traffic for a while, though it has decreased with the rise of legal and convenient streaming services.

Most of which (unfortunately) run on the WWW.

I'm not sure what the native clients for Netflix and Spotify actually run, but I use their WWW clients mostly. Making most of my internet bits&bytes go over the WWW.

Thank god network people haven't drunk the centralization kool-aid.

It’s the equivalent to JIT manufacturing. Cheaper when everything is going fine, and devastating when it’s not. And then when everything goes down at once there’s not enough advantage to being the only one still up.

about that...

Interestingly, server side rendered pages worked well during the outage. Most of the issues were caused by sites that are relying too much on Javascript.

Yes, my personal project was working fine all the time. Only I couldn't access the Stripe payment system dashboard

And only those websites on some networks. If I connect my phone to my cell network instead of wifi, the problem sites work for me.

There are ten websites left on the internet and they're all hosted by four or so megacorps. Isn't it great?

"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."

-- https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

:-(

Most people don't need any of them to continue with their life though!

The Web (World Wide Web) build atop of the Internet, is not impervious.

ps. "The Internet was build to survive attacks" is not true. It's a myth made popular by Robert Cringely in the early 1990s. The Arpanet was simply a protocol for mainframes used by computer scientists to connect. The Internet is relatively resilient against attacks, but that was not the "whole idea". It was not in the design at all.

Bob Taylor: “In February of 1966 I initiated the ARPAnet project. I was Director of ARPA‘s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from late ‚65 to late ‚69. There were only two people involved in the decision to launch the ARPAnet: my boss, the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, and me. The creation of the ARPAnet was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPAnet was created to enable folks with common interests to connect with one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography”.

Vint Cerf says the same about invention if TCP/IP transport protocol.

BGP (the protocol underpinning the internet) is built entirely for avoiding outages of any size.

Even email has a method baked into to the protocol for handling failure.

Fallbacks are good, baking in resiliency is better.

BGP has its problems (that time centurylink blackholed traffic but wouldn't drop their connections, bgp hijacks etc), but it's not centralised in single (or very few) points of failure

User iso1631 talked about attacks, not just outages.

The basic design BGP is very vulnerable against malicious attacks. Email security is nonexistent.