BREAKING: Major Internet Outage in China, Now In The US? Gmail, Google Plus Affected
This week many huge internet sites like baidu.com went down in China. Now a US company is facing similar problems: Google. Many Google services including Google Mail, Google Plus and some other services are affected
Update: We’ll update you on this as the story develops
China’s Leading Sites Down, Stocks Plunging
BAIDU and SINA Corp, two major players in China were affected by outages this week. Although, outages sporadically occur, it is very uncommon that multiple major players like Baidu and Google are affected in the same week. Bloomberg speculates that the “great Chinese internet firewall” was responsible for the outage.
In the past, Facebook suffered outages from time to time, sometimes lasting up to 2 hours. Usually the outtimes are caused by bugs or internal maintenance issues (datacenters, security, attacks), but they are usually fixed quickly. Facebook and Google have huge teams and can address problems very quickly
What’s Next?
Hopefully this internet outage will only last hours and the affected companies can recover quickly. It would be truly unimaginable if this was just a pre-cursor to a global internet outage caused by hackers. An internet outage would hit the recovering global economy very badly.
So far, it looks only Google is affected and it is very likely that it’s an internal problem that will be resolved eventually. However, it’s still a very odd coincidence, don’t you think?
I’m always surprised that many people believe it’s “impossible” to bring down the internet. The average joe greatly relies on DNS and don’t know that domainA.com is associated with IP 173.194.70.138 and even if only a few of the top root servers are affected it would affect millions
If you are interested to find out how vulnerable the internet really is, here’s a whitepaper on this
https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/dns/secure-root-dns-servers-991