Oct 12, 2021

Why does the internet keep breaking?

Facebook blamed a routine maintenance job for the disruption - its engineers had issued a command that unintentionally disconnected Facebook data centres from the wider internet. Facebook is now used to sign-in to a range of different services and devices, such as smart televisions. November 2020: A technical problem with one of Amazon Web Service's facility in Virginia, USA, impacted thousands of third-party online services for several hours, mostly in North America. Internet scientist Professor Bill Buchanan agrees with this characterisation: "The internet isn't the large-scale distributed network that DARPA, the original architects of the internet, tried to create, which could withstand a nuclear-strike on any part of it."The protocols it uses are basically just the ones that were drafted when we connected to mainframe computers from dumb terminals. Although significant internet outages affect users lives and businesses they can also, ultimately, help to improve the resilience of the internet and the web services plugged into it.

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