Can you hear me now?

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As the twitter account for Comcast notes: https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1012767042158510080 Ouch. We are having a slight problem… or rathe
[See the full post at: Can you hear me now?]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Mr. Natural, woody, HiFlyer, Elly

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I live in Illinois outside Chicago and I been haveing problems all day off and on with my cable T V and my Internet.

Both have been going up and down all day.

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Can you hear me now?

No, but I can see, what you say!

Why should it affect anyone?? Just route the packages “the other way around”?

Thought the InterWeb was a criss-cross of connections, that can’t really be broken…

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HiFlyer

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Oh but then there was that thunder storm….

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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You would not believe how many of our offices are getting taken down from thunderstorms. Even the building I’m in went down Monday night. It just happen to also take out the UPS connected to our router providing internet access and some switches. Tuesday was fun fixing all the network quirks after getting it back up.

Red Ruffnsore

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You need to install lightning arrestors at the fuse panels for each office. It is the only way to effectively prevent lightning from taking out the electronic equipment in an office. Two years ago, a drunk driver took out a power pole, causing the high voltage lines to drop onto the low voltage lines. The effect was the same as a lightning strike. This took out many very expensive analysis machines at a local testing laboratory which we use. The repairs to the machines cost way over $50K. The machines at the laboratory were down for anywhere from two weeks to nearly two months.

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The backbone of the Internet does indeed look like a web, with multiple, redundant connections between any two points. So in theory, subject to peering agreements and traffic volumes, it should be possible to route traffic around most link failures.

But… The closer you get to the periphery the more the Internet looks like a tree, with choke-points and bottlenecks. If you happen to be sitting on an ISP’s tree limb, and someone cuts it off, then you are definitely going to crash and burn.

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Noel Carboni, Jan K., lanceboil, woody

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According to the ComcastCares message to customers:

“One of Comcast’s large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible” (Emphasis mine.)

So it is the backbone. The question is: the backbone of what?

Is it the ‘backbone’ of Comcast? (Not trying to be facetious here.)

Meaning: is this, perhaps, just a confusing use by Comcast of some in-house jargon? Because if the meaning of this message, in plain English, is exactly what is written, then there could be some serious reason for worrying as East Coast and West Coast  have been impacted.

If cutting an Internet’s backbone cable can demonstrably cause extensive losses of service in both coasts of the USA, then the Internet today might be more physically vulnerable to attacks than has been thought possible.  And how this could have happened is something that would deserve some serious in depth investigation.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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Noel Carboni

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Backbones are necessary… for humans & the Internet. This site isn’t affected, but another of my favorites was, until just now. Hey, it happens!

Bought a refurbished Windows 10 64-bit, currently updated to 22H2. Have broke the AC adapter cord going to the 8.1 machine, but before that, coaxed it into charging. Need to buy new adapter if wish to continue using it.
Wild Bill Rides Again...

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No issues all day in metro Atlanta. Did not even know there was problem.

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Our locations in Chicago, Albany, Salisbury and some areas of Baltimore were affected.

Red Ruffnsore

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Which reminds me, Frank Heart who led the team that developed the Interface Message Processor (IMP) died this past week.  From wiki: “BBN began programming work in February 1969 on modified Honeywell DDP-516s. The completed code was six thousand words long, and was written in the Honeywell 516 assembly language. The IMP software was produced primarily on a PDP-1, where the IMP code was written and edited, then run on the Honeywell”.

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Noel Carboni, SueW, woody, Jan K.

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Comcast cable down from 11:50 until 3:25 PM in Central VA. Don’t trust them with Internet. Verizon 15 Mbps DSL mostly rock-solid.

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Jan K. wrote:

Can you hear me now?

Thought the InterWeb was a criss-cross of connections, that can’t really be broken…

About 10 – 15 years ago there was a Verizon fiver cut in my region that took out service for an extended time frame. Both cables were run together under a bridge without proper protection. When the creek they ran over flooded and froze both primary and backup lines were damaged.

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OscarCP

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This in from Lily Hay Newman at Wired:

“We identified two, separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone providers,” Comcast said in a statement to WIRED. “Our engineers worked to address the issue immediately and services are now being restored to business and residential internet, video and voice customers.”

Comcast says the two internet infrastructure companies involved are Level 3 (now owned by CenturyLink) and Zayo, a fiber company headquartered in Colorado.

Looks like it was two unrelated cuts in North Carolina, and one in New York.

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columbia2011

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Happened a couple months ago too. Comcast is not the only ones affected but I have always wondered with broadband being such a important part of communication these days. I have to wonder why a more parallel distribution system was never setup to work around outages such as this. When you have so many affected from a cut in just one place. You have to wonder how vulnerable our system is to a multiple location attack?

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OscarCP

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So I decided to research this and came up with the following:

“Tier 3”, now in its new incarnation as part of “CenturyLink” that bought it at the end of last year, is a Tier 1 Internet Provider (IP), meaning that it provides connections to and across the networks of other IPs, and of those to the wider Internet. (I might be wrong, but believe the broad telecom technical name for them is Wide Area Networks or WANs, which I prefer to think of as “super LANs”.)  So it looks like this major breakdown happened in the branches of the final distribution tree, not in the core of the Internet. The “backbone” was not an Internet backbone, after all. Which is a small cause for relief. But only a small one. Because “Tier 3” that,  as it is obvious now, can be vulnerable to intentional physical attacks, and not just to some of its critically important cables being cut accidentally (as so far, it seems, is all that happened yesterday), is a company that does provide Internet connections to some very important organizations of serious interest to us all:

From Wikipedia:

“On May 14, 2012, Level 3 was contracted by European content provider Voxility to provide 250 Gbit/s or more to Voxility’s three main data centers in North America and Europe.  On May 7, 2012, Level 3 was contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense‘s Defense Information Systems Agency to provide fiber-cable operations and maintenance, and IP-based infrastructure under a ten-year, indefinite contract with a maximum value of approximately $411 million.”

And who knows what else depends on companies like this.

So, this does not make the Internet itself vulnerable, but it might just as well.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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OscarCP wrote:

“Tier 3”, now in its new incarnation as part of “CenturyLink” that bought it at the end of last year, is a Tier 1 Internet Provider (IP), meaning that it provides connections to and across the networks of other IPs, and of those to the wider Internet.

OscarCP, fyi: think maybe you might have meant to type “Level 3” (not “Tier 3”).

Although both companies now part of CenturyLink, Tier 3 != Level 3
(for Tier 3, think ~ cloud computing/data center svcs;
for Level 3, think ~ fiber links/internet backbone/isp internetwork connectivity…)

So, as referenced/alluded to in your posted Wikipedia quote, the Tier 1 network you mention was part of the Level 3 acquisition. Hope this helps.

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Anonymous: Quite. Thanks for the clarification.

Now a clarification of my own: I was making the point that what happened last week is an object lesson that important links of the USA communications’ infrastructure can break (or be accidentally or even intentionally broken) and disconnect a huge number of people, systems and critical installations without any warning. The question is: how easy? What does it take?  Little more than a shovel or a hacksaw? Or sheer neglect that lets the cables rot away? Or poor network design? Plenty of choices, none of them great for this country. So it might be an idea to find out exactly what happened and why it happened and who is responsible for what, in order to proceed accordingly. So far, no answers, only some tired PR people serving their company’s stale “we care” dish.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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