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Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by unethical_ban on Friday November 26, 2021 @04:42PM (#29354452)
I didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.
Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by xwolfi on Friday November 26, 2021 @05:55PM (#29355120)
You alread listed 3 single points of failure. I get what you mean: the entry point search engine, the global cache and the global backend/storage/compute.

But look I live in Hong Kong, I dont feel that way: there are other backends, we could survive without the caching for a while and Google is forbidden for 1.4bn people who get on with it very well...

Depends what you call the internet. Yes, facebook and whatsapp are gone the minute one of those 3 companies screwed up.

Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by rdp36 on Friday November 26, 2021 @08:41PM (#29356351)
OK, you think 1.4 billion people without the freedom to search is ok? LOL.
Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by genewitch on Saturday November 27, 2021 @02:00AM (#29358187)
I wouldn't say Google is search, per se. I haven't used Google for search in a few years.
Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by tatersolid on Saturday November 27, 2021 @07:12AM (#29359577)
If Google search went away for more than 24 hours, Bing/DDG/others would quickly get overwhelmed as people learned about alternatives and switched.

Bing might be able to auto-scale using Azure infrastructure but there might not be enough hardware even there.

Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by betterunix2 on Friday November 26, 2021 @09:44PM (#29356790)
WWW != Internet

Yes, for the majority of users the two may be the same, but "The Internet" is the IPv4 and IPv6 network on which the web runs. The equivalent companies to what you named are the transit network operators, companies like Hurricane Electric, AT&T, CenturyLink, etc. The list of transit networks is very long, much longer than the list of major web hosting companies.

Now, that said, it is absolutely true that there are ways where major outages can be the result of just one failure. Last year there was a major outage on the US east cost after a Verizon fiber optic line was severed in NYC; it turns out that this line carried many supposedly redundant links, all bundled into a single cable. The failure of that line then caused a cascade of failures as rerouted traffic began overwhelming other systems, but in the end the outage was contained in a relatively small geographic region, albeit one with many Internet users.

Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by throw0101a on Friday November 26, 2021 @04:51PM (#29354525)
The article is about BGP and Internet Routing Registry (IRR): routing.
Re:The internet is held together with spit and baling wire by inopinatus on Friday November 26, 2021 @10:33PM (#29357118)
Those are not single points.