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rolltime

"the internet is a resilient network"

the internet when one cdn goes down:

A DownDetector screenshot. Many services show the same pattern of issues, indicating a single point of failure.
76 comments
Frang :veripawed4:

@rolltime "Nothing works if we cannot serve ads!"

Cysio :verified_gay:​

@rolltime internet was working, it was the websites that struggled

mkj

@me My take too. Nobody said anything about corporate services.

Me? "There was an outage?" 🙂

@rolltime

DELETED

@mkj @me @rolltime Looks to me like that CDN should be offline more frequently... The Internet got better for just a bit there

calcifer :nes_fire:

@rolltime @me it was the most popular corporate websites. Mine was fine.

Meu

@rolltime@freeradical.zone don't confuse the world wide web and the internet

OrbitalMartian :GoToSocial:

@rolltime That's fucking crazy, I get why CDNs exist but why do so many large corpoations use them, such an odd thing.

F4GRX Sébastien

@orbitalmartian @rolltime CDNs exist because megabytes of javascript and super duper HD images and scrolling video backgrounds.

OrbitalMartian :GoToSocial:

@f4grx @rolltime I know that but why can't each large corporations host their own... They have the infrastructure majority of the time. That's the bit that amazes me.

I mean they could always go back to the good ol' days of plain text HTML.

F4GRX Sébastien

@orbitalmartian @rolltime It also amazes me. yes, of course more distribution of data is better. thats the way it should be.

F4GRX Sébastien

@orbitalmartian @rolltime And there are vast amounts of middle ground between good old html and bloated sites as they exist today.

Jess👾

The point of CDNs is to get your content cached all over the region/globe as close to your customers as you can with sufficient capacity to survive DDOS or even just surge traffic from going viral. All but the biggest companies don't want to invest in that much hardware and software capacity to stage servers in that many different data centers for only occasional peak usage needs, so they buy CDN services from someone who specializes in it.

Unfortunately, since it's a pretty expensive business to get into, it tends to settle into something of a natural oligopoly of only a handful of big companies.

@orbitalmartian
@f4grx @rolltime

The point of CDNs is to get your content cached all over the region/globe as close to your customers as you can with sufficient capacity to survive DDOS or even just surge traffic from going viral. All but the biggest companies don't want to invest in that much hardware and software capacity to stage servers in that many different data centers for only occasional peak usage needs, so they buy CDN services from someone who specializes in it.

xyhhx :PunkFelix:

@JessTheUnstill mfs have never heard of a single point of failure n it shows

@orbitalmartian @f4grx @rolltime

Jess👾

More likely, they have a high enough SLA with their CDNs that they just build in the expectation that they'll have outages for a little while per year.
@xyhhx
@orbitalmartian @f4grx @rolltime

Kurt 🕴️:verified_blobCat:

@orbitalmartian @f4grx @rolltime it's cheaper not to host it yourself if you are a huge corporation

F4GRX Sébastien

@Kurt @orbitalmartian @rolltime and if the website was much, much simpler than the marketing team requires? And that does not mean ugly.

Viraptor

@orbitalmartian @f4grx @rolltime not that kind of infrastructure. CDNs usually have a PoP in each region, with some good connections to local ISPs. Netflix can do even better and embed their storage at ISPs directly, but "large corporations" on average don't deal with that level of deployment.

unfa🇺🇦

@orbitalmartian @f4grx @rolltime I think big business needs big buzzwords, so you can't have a website that doesn't use all the latest and greatest JavaScript frameworks, databases and stuff. If you don't have more microservices than users, then you're not doing real work there :D

gz

@f4grx @orbitalmartian @rolltime
JavaScript, killing the Web one page at a time.™

rolltime

@Mendie_Taoma Yeah, not sure what’s down but it killed the GitHub pages site I was reading docs on, which was annoying.

Antranig Vartanian :freebsd:

@rolltime my home website when one CDN goes down: still working all fine!

F4GRX Sébastien

@rolltime CDNs should be forbidden. If a site is slow, thats because the site has too much shit on it. throwing more hardware at it does not fix the problem, quite the contrary in fact.

I am Jack's Lost 404

@f4grx @rolltime

It's that picture where they build more highway lanes to reduce traffic only only for it to get all clogged up by more traffic again

I am Jack's Lost 404

@foolishowl @f4grx @rolltime

Thanks! I never knew there was a name for it

If you build it, they will come...

Deborah Hartmann Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦

@float13 @foolishowl @f4grx @rolltime off topic / re: Braess's Paradox & "If you build it, they will come..."

🤔 how can we use Braess's Paradox for Good? #climateCrisis #rhetoricalquestion

Deborah Hartmann Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦

@float13 @foolishowl @f4grx @rolltime hey! 😈

What if we build LOTS of roads, they'll all be congested, and we line them with billboards encouraging a more earth-friendly lifestyle?

Hmm 🤔 seems like overkill ... but, what's the digital version of that? #stillThinking 🤪

rugk

@deborahh
Well except cdns do also protect against DDOS aka stopping malicious cars crashing and blocking the whole street. (yes this is the point where the metaphor breaks apart)
See infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnsti for more information though.
@float13 @foolishowl @f4grx @rolltime

Sturmkrähe

@f4grx @rolltime What alternative would you suggest for say a small/middle-sized company producing content for language learning like PDF, audio, videos, and selling them worldwide (Europe, Brazil, Philippines...)?

Sturmkrähe

@f4grx @rolltime Hardly posdible for a small company to maintain servers all over the world.

F4GRX Sébastien

@avradi @rolltime this was a hot take, right?

No real problem can b solved by a single sentence. But thats still good to question what we take for granted.

Jorge

@robdaemon oh this is probably what is breaking my Tidbyt

Paul

@rolltime The network is resilient (less interference by megacorps/governments). What's running on top of it, not so much.

Annika Backstrom

@rolltime gonna pretend I don't see my employer on there and stay in bed

Fisch

@rolltime Interesting that I didn't even notice that but what was down? Cloudflare?

ahoyboyhoy

@fisch @rolltime I'm only aware of a Fastly outage that affected me for 45 minutes today.

gz

@rolltime
That internet is fine, it's built to be resilient. The Web, not so much.

[nate@social0 ~]$ :idle:

@rolltime @Viss The internet is a resilient network. But it's hard. and this industry's usual answer to hard is.. we can do that for you! And then competition being what it is... You end up here..

Cdnpup

@rolltime internet resilience and internet security and internet privacy are all a myth.

millions :spinny_cat_bi:

@rolltime imagine if Amazon's cdn and cloudflare went down at the same time

HACK13

@rolltime one of the reasons I don't rely on Cloudflare for my instance :blobfoxgoogly:

Paul_IPv6

@rolltime

"the internet is a number of resilient (but not redundant) networks"

:)

Caroline Bell :verified:

@rolltime
These websites are not the internet.
We are the internet.

markc568

@rolltime COMPANY: We don’t want to host copies of all these JS libraries ourselves! WTF!?! Use whatever free CDN you find.
ME: Production systems will go down if these rando CDNs aren’t available for *any* reason. You OK with that?
COMPANY: 🦗 🦗🦗

Kancept

@rolltime but it took the internet to get the data to generate that page.

aismallard

@rolltime centralization of the internet 😔

🐧DaveNull🐧 ☣️pResident Evil☣

@rolltime Well, corporate websites are not the internet… which kept working just fine. So yes, IT'S ACTUALLY a resilient network…

@jwz

Jonathan Lamothe

@rolltime Say what you will about the laptop in a closet I'm using as a server, but when something like this happens, it just keeps chugging along.

Ignore the fact that it was down for four days because I had to buy a replacement machine.

Skylar Caulfield :blue_verify:

@rolltime@freeradical.zone it’s gonna be even worse when congress passss a bill banning self hosting and demands anyone who wants to host anything run it by them and pay trillions of dollars first.

Eragon
@rolltime Technically it's the web there.
But if Gcloud, Azure or AWS is down half of the internet goes down with them
Khrys

@rolltime That's not the internet. That's (a certain kind of) the present web

JimmyChezPants

@rolltime

Thing is, downdetector is still working fine in order for you to make this point.

Perhaps the internet is exactly as robust and resilient as it claims, but these capitalist sites with their insane requirements and user loads that *require* these massive meta-networks of dumb data delivery servers, maybe they are not so well-thought-out as the underlying infrastructure that is perfectly capable of watching them burn out regularly.

Eugene Glover

@rolltime @eurozerozero The cost of resiliency has always been anathema to the corporate bottom line.

🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦

@rolltime Outage limited to the US east coast.
Seems resilient from over here… One region of one CDN can go down without dragging other parts of the net down with it.

rolltime

@rugk I think it was fastly, but unsure.

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