Across the Internet, yesterday, Google users twittered, blogged and emailed that Google search and mail were not usable. And, yesterday afternoon, on Google's official blog, Urs Hoelzle reported that Google "direct[ed] some [...] web traffic through Asia".
Ike swept across Texas on Saturday, devastating Galveston and severely damaging Houston and Harris County before plodding intensely north and east through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. While many Texan networks remain unreachable, the recovery is proceeding remarkably quickly. From a peak of around 100 networks suffering outage through Monday, Ohio, still hard hit, is also slowly starting to recover. And Pennsylvania is the latest victim of Ike.
Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas as a (high-end) category 2 hurricane around 02:00 CDT this morning. Today, we are all watching the destructive land-wake of the storm with our thoughts on those in its path.
The pattern of network outages seems consistent with other historical storms of Ike's ilk. The counties around Galveston and Houston, TX (most notably Harris County) have suffered a slowly climbing number of network outages over the last day. We expect to see this number continue to climb as the secondary effects (e.g. power loss, UPS battery failure, generator fuel unavailability) of the storm hit the region.
Late in the (UTC) day on 24 February 2008, Pakistan Telecom (AS 17557) began advertising a small part of YouTube's (AS 36561) assigned network. This story is almost as old as BGP. Old hands will recognize this as, fundamentally, the same problem as the infamous AS 7007 from 1997, a more recent ConEd mistake of early 2006 and even TTNet's Christmas Eve gift 2004.
Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order to block access to YouTube (see news item) started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491). For those unfamiliar with BGP, this is a more specific route than the ones used by YouTube (208.65.152.0/22), and therefore most routers would choose to send traffic to Pakistan Telecom for this slice of YouTube's network.
